Zimbabwean officials seize US food aid

Children's relief ordered given to Mugabe backers

JOHANNESBURG - Zimbabwean authorities confiscated a truck loaded with 20 tons of American food aid for poor schoolchildren and ordered that the wheat and pinto beans aboard be handed out to supporters of President Robert Mugabe at a political rally instead, the American ambassador said yesterday.

"This government will stop at nothing, even starving the most defenseless people in the country - young children - to realize their political ambitions," said the ambassador, James D. McGee, in an interview.

The government ordered all humanitarian aid groups to suspend their operations last week, charging that some of them were giving out food as bribes to win votes for the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in a June 27 presidential runoff against Mugabe.

But political analysts, aid workers and human rights groups contend that it is, in fact, Zimbabwe's governing party that has ruthlessly used food to reward supporters and punish opponents in a country where agricultural production has collapsed over the past decade and millions of people would go hungry each year without emergency assistance.

The seizure of the truck laden with food aid is a case in point, McGee said. It occurred Friday in an area called Bambazonke near the town of Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe.

The truck was hired by one of three nongovernmental organizations - CARE, Catholic Relief Services, and World Vision - that form a consortium and contract with the US Agency for International Development to distribute food aid in Zimbabwe. Its cargo of wheat, beans, and vegetable oil was intended for 26 primary schools, American officials said, part of a program that provides hungry children with one solid meal a day.

Misheck Kagurabadza, a former mayor of Mutare and a newly elected member of Parliament from Manicaland Province, said the cutoff of food from aid groups was devastating. The government has a monopoly on buying corn, Zimbabwe's main staple food, from farmers and will sell it only to those who hold ZANU-PF party cards, he contends.

"The relief agencies stopped distribution of food a few days ago," said Kagurabadza, one of many opposition leaders who have gone into hiding to avoid a sweeping crackdown by ZANU-PF, the governing party. "I don't know how we'll survive until the next harvest."

The Famine Early Warning System, an operation that forecasts global hunger emergencies and is financed by USAID, put out an alert last Thursday that estimated Zimbabwe's corn harvest at less than half of last year's. The cereals - corn and other grains - produced this season will amount to little over a quarter of the food needed to feed the country, it said.

Last year the United States, the world's dominant food aid donor, provided about 175,000 tons of food to Zimbabwe worth $171 million, American officials said. It already has about $96 million worth of food in the pipeline for Zimbabwe this year, with more on the way, they said.

The food aid that was confiscated was on a truck that began its rounds last Thursday, but that had a mechanical breakdown and wound up seeking a safe haven by parking overnight at the Bambazonke police station, American officials said.

It had been a very eventful day. US diplomats who had gone to investigate political violence north of the capital were detained for five hours at a police roadblock after a 6-mile car chase and threats to burn them alive in their vehicle, American officials said.

That evening, Zimbabwe's government released a letter ordering the suspension of all field operations by aid groups, but it reached many of the groups only last Friday - too late to head off the truck on its rounds.

At one of the schools on those rounds, the truck's driver, a Zimbabwean, was approached by police officers and war veterans led by an army colonel. They said they had been sent by the governor of Manicaland Province, Tinaye Chigudu, and accused the driver of trying to bribe people with food, McGee said.

"The group threatened the driver and forced him to return to the Bambazonke police station," McGee said, calling it a hijacking.

In the meantime, Chigudu and other ZANU-PF officials organized a rally near the police station.

At the station, "the governor instructed the war veterans to distribute the food to ZANU-PF supporters at the rally right down the street," McGee said. "Some police officers tried to intervene to stop the looting. The governor told them, 'stand down.' Those were his exact words."