Zimbabwe crisis worse than feared, Carter says

Former president Jimmy Carter told reporters in South Africa yesterday that the government of President John Mugabe of Zimbabwe has failed to even recognize that a crisis exists. (Themba Hadebe/ Reuters)

JOHANNESBURG - Former president Jimmy Carter said yesterday that Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis was far worse than he could have imagined and expressed dismay that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and his government refused to acknowledge the problem even existed.

"The entire basic structure in education, healthcare, feeding people, social services, and sanitation has broken down," Carter said at a news conference in Johannesburg. "These are all indications that the crisis in Zimbabwe is much greater, much worse than we had ever imagined."

Carter was part of a delegation that was denied entry into Zimbabwe last week to assess the crisis. The delegation also included former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Grace Machel, wife of Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa.

An estimated 4.9 million people in Zimbabwe are desperately in need of food aid. More than 300 have already died in a cholera epidemic.

The delegates are from a group known as the Elders, set up by Mandela to address serious crises around the world. Instead of traveling to Mugabe's nation, the group held meetings in neighboring South Africa with Zimbabwean refugees and opposition leaders, South African government officials, diplomats, and humanitarian agencies.

Citing those briefings, Carter said Mugabe and his government had refused to meet with the United Nations, charitable organizations, and ambassadors from major donor countries for the past year.

"I think it's the established policy of the Mugabe government that there's no crisis in Zimbabwe," Carter said.

Noting that this year's planting season had been squandered because no seed was available, Carter said the earliest possible harvest is April 2010.

"Meanwhile people are suffering from lack of food, which is the most critical need at this time," he said.

Carter also said that none of the four main hospitals in Zimbabwe was working, and that only 20 percent of children were attending school. The main reason, he said, was that teachers had stopped showing up for work because salaries, about $1 a month, did not even cover their transportation costs.

President Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa said the crisis was so serious that Zimbabwe could implode and collapse. He said the root cause was the lack of a legitimate government.

Mugabe, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, and the leader of a small opposition group, Arthur Mutambara, agreed in September to share power after disputed elections, but soon after, Mugabe allocated the most powerful Cabinet jobs to members of his party, the Zimbabwe Africa National Union, Patriotic Front.

Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has argued that it would not be able to solve the humanitarian crisis with Mugabe's security forces dominating the nation.

Annan said regional leaders had been slow to act as the crisis unfolded, particularly after African observers condemned elections in June.

He also ratcheted up the pressure on Tsvangirai, saying that if Zimbabwe's leaders put the interests of the people first, they would draw the right conclusions on what was most important.

Tsvangirai's spokesman, George Sibotshiwe, said it was wrong to blame the Movement for Democratic Change for Zimbabwe's crisis.

"The person who's responsible for the mess is Robert Mugabe," Sibotshiwe said. "He's been in power for 28 years."