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Thousands In Desperate
Flight From Zimbabwe

By Michael Dynes on the Limpopo River
The Times - London
2-7-2

Barely a month before Zimbabwe's presidential election, Clever Tarindwa, 24, a poor farm worker from Chipinge near the Mozambican border, voted with his feet to seek a new life in South Africa.
 
Driven into penury by two years of political turmoil that has brought Zimbabweís once prosperous economy to its knees, he jumped on a bus heading for the border township of Beitbridge.
 
There he was met by the guma-guma men, a group of extortionists who take people across the swirling waters of the Limpopo at night for the hefty sum of 100 rand (£6.50).
 
Mr Tarindwa, unlike some of his countrymen, who get swept away or eaten by crocodiles, made it to the other side. Within hours he was picked up by a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) patrol and handed to the police in the nearby town of Messina for immediate deportation.
 
"I left home because there is no work and no food," he said. "I came here in search of a job. Everyone says that life in South Africa is good. It used to be good in Zimbabwe, but that's all gone now."
 
Sibongile Moyo, 22, who was picked up after leaving her village near Bulawayo, told the same story. "Work is hard to get in Zimbabwe," she said. "There is not enough food. It is expensive and we donít have enough money to buy. The people are frightened. They get beaten."
 
Mr Tarindwa and Miss Moyo are two of thousands of black Zimbabweans fleeing President Mugabe's attempts to cling to power.
 
Every hour a police lorry leaves Messina with 30 to 40 'undocumented migrants' for the ten-mile trip back to the border, where they are then dumped on the other side. Most are picked up while trying to hitch a lift on the main road to Johannesburg. Others are caught while trying to make their way through local game or hunting grounds, or are turned in by people who fear that migrants will take their jobs and their women.
 
Hundreds of South African soldiers patrol the three razor-wire fences along the border with Zimbabwe that were erected during the apartheid era to keep out African National Congress guerrillas.
 
ìThey wrap themselves in blankets and crawl under the fence,î Godfrey Mathabatha, a private on one of the border patrols, said. "When we catch them, their clothes are torn. They are tired and thirsty and have gone for a week without something to eat."
 
An old army base at Artonvilla, on the banks of the Limpopo, has been earmarked by the Pretoria Government as a reception centre for migrants, should the situation in Zimbabwe 'reach meltdown'. It can hold up to 1,000 people, who would be taken back to the border in convoy as fast as they were caught.
 
Colonel Tol Synman, the officer in charge of the regional SANDF, said. "We arrest up to 2,500 a month. But we have no idea how many get through." Some estimates put the figure as high as 500 a day.
 
"We are getting more and more undocumented migrants now because of the shortage of food in Zimbabwe," Colonel Synman said.
 
"They cross the river even when the water is chest high. Our troops have reported some of them being swept away or eaten by crocodiles."
 
He said that unless the illegal migrants were granted refugee status, "our job will remain to hold the line."


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