Food as a weapon

This isn’t the first time that Zanu PF has sought to seize control of food aid distribution and The Zimbabwean is reporting that it is happening again.

Mugabe wants control over food aid distribution (The Zimbabwean)
President Robert Mugabe’s government has told relief agencies to handover food and other humanitarian assistance to state organs for distribution to victims of political violence, the National Association of Non-governmental Organisations (NANGO) said on Tuesday.

NANGO spokesman Fambai Ngirande said aid groups had rejected the plan fearing it would lead to partisan distribution of aid with known opposition supporters likely to be denied assistance.

Mugabe’s government is often accused of denying food aid to hungry supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party as punishment for not backing the veteran leader – a charge the government denies. [...]

Ngirande said: “The government has indicated that it would accept assistance from NGOs on condition that state organs would be in control and we felt this would result in a very partisan distribution.

“As a result we have had to establish a support system that is clandestine and a lot of risky work is being undertaken by our local groups to reach out to those in need of help.”

Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu defended the government’s decision to insist on controlling distribution of aid, saying the Harare administration would not give “free rein” to NGOs wanting to use relief work as a pretext to campaign for MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

“We are suspicious of them because they openly support MDC people. If we allow them to distribute assistance, they will use it to campaign for Tsvangirai while undermining our own government,” said Ndlovu. “We can’t allow them to drive the regime change agenda that easily.

In my last post on food I linked to previous articles we’ve written on the topic. This time I want to draw your attention to this extract from the Breaking the Silence report (republished in book form as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe), which clearly shows how food can be brutally used as a weapon and has been used as a weapon previously in our country under Robert Mugabe’s leadership.

The events referred to below are the crackdown by the Mugabe regime against civilians living in the South of Zimbabwe in 1984. It is estimated that as many as 30,000 were murdered during the Gukurahundi by the 5 Brigade acting on government orders.

The food embargo was a major factor in events in Matabeleland South in 1984. Through the early months of 1984, residents of Matabeleland South were suffering from starvation caused in the first place, by three consecutive years of drought and in the second place, by Government restrictions preventing all movement of food into and around the region. Drought relief was stopped and stores were closed. Almost no people were allowed into and out of the region to buy food, and private food supplies were destroyed.

The psychological impact of the food embargo was profound[...] All events which occurred [in Matobo] did so against the background of a seriously weakened and demoralised populace, who were having to watch their children cry and beg for food their parents were unable to provide on a daily basis. State officials, largely in the form of 5 Brigade, also actively punished those villagers who shared food with starving neighbours. The speeches of 5 Brigade commanders at rallies repeatedly stated the desire of the Government to starve all the Ndebele to death, as punishment for their being dissidents. In the most cruel speeches, people in the region were told hey would be starved until they ate each other, including their own wives and children [speech included in full in the report]

Those interviewed recount how they struggled to stay alive during the embargo, by eating the roots and fruits of wild plants. However, in some areas the 5 Brigade tried to prevent even this, and punished people for eating wild marula fruit. Even water was severely rationed. People also talk of risking their lives and breaking the curfew to share food with neighbours after dark, and their disbelief at seeing bags of maize ripped open and destroyed wherever 5 Brigade found them - or buses or in homes. [...]

Stores [in the Matobo area] were not allowed to re-stock any products during the curfews, and those that occasionally opened soon had no food at all. The army took control of the regional National Foods depot to ensure mealie-meal was not distributed to stores. Anyone wishing to buy food in Bulawayo, to send to relatives in curfew zones, needed a permit from the police or the army, and these were rarely granted. There are also in interviews many accounts of people being brutally tortured when found waiting at shopping centres, the accusation being that they were trying to break the food curfew. [...]

The food embargo alone was thus a significant and effective strategy which proved, to 400,000 ordinary people in Matabeleland South, the power of the State to cause extreme hardship.

Extract taken from Gukurhundi in Zimbabwe: p.219-221

Having read this extract, can you see why acts of burning maize resonate in our country and why reports that the government is seeking to control food aid brings with it a sense of horror?

I know, as well as any Zimbabwean person does, how badly people are suffering in Zimbabwe and how vulnerable they are to the smallest impact on their food supplies. Today I heard a story about a pensioner who once had a comfortable existence and thought his old age requirements were taken care of. Hyperinflation has destroyed that for him. This person has not adjusted to the idea that he is no longer self-sufficient; he has chosen to live rough rather than ’seek charity’ and when he was last seen he was boiling leaves to eat because that was all he had. This man is waiting to die, and determined to do it alone and with his pride and dignity intact.

If you consider that this person was once ‘economically comfortable’, where does that leave those in our society who were already poverty stricken before the economy went into free-fall? And what will happen to them if Zanu PF sees them as the ‘enemy’ that needs to be controlled and forced to vote the right way.

On a recent rip to South Africa, my companion and I were driving along at a sensible speed (dictated more by the number of pot-holes in the road than safety awareness) and we saw odd shapes shifting on the horizon; we couldn’t work out what kind of animal we were approaching. As we got closer we realised they were women, bent over double and vigorously sweeping the tarmac. It was the oddest thing to see in the middle of nowhere. To our horror, we saw one of the woman narrowly escape death because she wouldn’t step off the road to avoid a massive lorry. My companion and I both yelled in our car, braking hard ourselves, as she just managed to jump out the way at the last minute.

Hunger in this area meant that the women had come to road to find food. They were sweeping some kind of grain off the tarmac, spillage from vehicles bringing food into the country. The lady who diced with death was determined to ensure she grabbed her small pile before the wind thrown up by the large truck sent it into the dusty verge. It was a scene of complete desperation. Please don’t imagine by those words that they were retrieving substantial amounts; they were desperately trying to salvage the most pitiful amounts of food. The idea that they could be punished for trying to survive - as happened during the Gukurahundi - appalls me.

The last time I mentioned food as a weapon I stumbled across this interesting post here on NormBlog. In it Norman Geras discusses what it is exactly that the UN has the responsibility to protect. Referencing Britain’s UN envoy John Sawers in relation to the Burmese crisis, Geras says:

Sawers is reported to have said that the 2005 resolution establishing that commitment ‘relates to acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and so forth, rather than government responses to natural disasters‘. But, in saying that, he would seem to take it for granted that a government’s response to natural disaster could not itself amount to a crime against humanity. Is that in fact so?

The horror of living through the manipulation of food supplies, in the context of a country with desperate food shortages and extreme hyperinflation, is to me one of the most calculated abuses of human rights. That these acts, in this context, would not be considered an ‘act of genocide’ or a ‘crime against humanity’ is incredible to me. Geras references an legal academic who makes a similar argument:

There’s an article by Sigrun Skogly in the International Journal of Human Rights for 2001, arguing for an extension of the concept of crimes against humanity so that it might cover severe violations of certain social and economic rights: as when a government denies people access to food or blocks humanitarian food aid. Part of Skogly’s case is that the various legal instruments defining crimes against humanity are somewhat open-ended in any case; as well as the specific offences they list, they also include reference to ‘other inhumane acts’. This is to be found in both Article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter and Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

By the sounds of the article in The Zimbabwean, and reflecting on history under Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF, it looks like ‘blocking food aid’ is something the regime is seriously considering.

Share This

This entry was written by Hope on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 6:17 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.