Zimbabwe Election Watch - Events

JOC plans to starve the nation unveiled
Source Date: 16-08-2007

The Joint Operations Command - a think tank of top security officials - is enforcing a deliberate and systematic ploy of using food to ensure President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party retains power.

Millions of people are going hungry not ... because of poor rains but as a direct result of policies ... denying food to opposition supporters and enriching its loyalists.

An elaborate plan hatched by the JOC to ban food imports, which has been reversed after being shamelessly exposed, forms part of this broad plan.

Top security officials told The Zimbabwean that control of the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), Zimbabwe's state-owned monopoly supplier of commercial maize, has been passed to one of Mugabe's most loyal henchmen, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, an alleged war criminal.

Shiri, who sits in the JOC together with other generals, two weeks ago appointed a new board at the GMB to oversee the elaborate strategy.

... sources alleged Shiri's mission was to spend a �17 million loan provided by Libya, buying just enough maize to stave off food riots, which would then be supplied through the GMB.

The organisation ... has been selling desperately short maize only to supporters of the ruling Zanu PF party. Backers of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change went hungry.

Worse still was the (planned) Food For Work programme. Thousands of opposition supporters would provide 15 days' labour only to be told at the end there was no GMB food for them...

There is also evidence that the Zimbabwean government, through the JOC, is deliberately blocking the work of international aid groups and keeping the flow of aid down to a trickle... Last month an aid consignment was seized in Masvingo.

"What we are seeing is nothing but humanitarian torture," an aid worker said. "It takes three months to die of starvation and this is a torture every bit as bad as beating someone with barbed wire or hanging them from
handcuffs."