- Dear Family and Friends,
-
- Two men were arrested on Thursday afternoon for attaching
a poster to a tree in Bulawayo. The poster, referring to no food
or fuel in the country read: "Hoot ! Enough is Enough". By the
weekend the men were still in prison, had been denied access to lawyers,
refused bail and were not allowed to receive food bought
for them by family members. Whilst this was happening I, along with 11
million others living in Zimbabwe, was desperately searching either for
food or petrol. There was none of the latter so I spent my Friday morning
trudging from shop to shop and after three hours gratefully clutched
2 loaves of bread I had finally tracked down for 4 times the official price.
I know I should not buy food on the black market but principles pale
into insignificance when you have a hungry child to feed.
-
- This is the face of life in Zimbabwe today and yet the
ECB (English Cricket Board) are still debating whether or not it is right
to come and play cricket here and are worrying about who will pay them
compensation if they don't come. I am disgusted that they can talk
about compensation for a cricket match when 300 000 farm workers have
been made destitute, 4000 farmers have been evicted from their homes
and had their properties grabbed by the state, 200 people have been murdered
in cold blood and not a single one of us has seen justice done or been
paid compensation for our losses. 6 million Zimbabweans are facing
starvation, 2 million of our citizens have been forced to leave the country,
one person dies every 5 minutes from aids related malnutrition, inflation
is at 175% and there is no food or fuel in the country and yet the world
is in an uproar about 6 cricket matches.
-
- A few months ago a friend of mine went to Harare. On
the way out of town he got lost and took a wrong turning at the Harare
Cricket grounds. Realising he was going the wrong way, my friend attempted
to do a U turn in an unmarked driveway. His car was surrounded by armed
men and he was ordered out of his vehicle. Everything was pulled out of
his car, he was interrogated at length and then taken behind a wall where
he was pushed around, knocked to the ground and kicked in the side of his
head. Five hours later my friend got home, exhausted and in shock and pain,
his ear drum ruptured from being kicked in the head. My friend's crime
was that he had turned into the driveway opposite President Mugabe's State
House. State House is next door to the grounds where the World Cup Cricket
matches are to be played. I've been inundated with emails from people who
say that sports and politics don't mix and that if the World Cup matches
are played here there will be massive protests and civil disobedience. But
let's face the facts, if you can be put into prison for tying
a poster on a tree or kicked in the head for doing a U turn near State
House than I wonder just how many of us will get dare get
involved in protests and demonstrations.
-
- For three years I've been writing this weekly letter
about conditions in Zimbabwe. I thank you for reading them and for
helping me expose the horrific truths. I thank you too for helping me spread
the word about my two books: African Tears and Beyond Tears, which are
still the only eye witness accounts to have been written about Zimbabwe's
horrors since 2000. Thanks to your help I've now managed to get orders
from book shops in Malawi, Namibia and Zambia. Stocks are freely available
in South Africa and hopefully soon we'll be able to find ways of getting copies
into Europe and America. I wish that confused cricketers worried about
compensation could read my books because I know if they did they would
never, in their wildest dreams, think it was right to come here and play
cricket. When you know that people have been tortured with burning
plastic, locked in steel containers and had electrodes attached to their
genitals for wanting democratic governance, then cricket doesn't
really seem appropriate does it.
-
- Until next week,
-
- with love, cathy.
-
- <http://africantears.netfirms.com>http://africantears.netfirms.com
- Copyright Cathy Buckle 4th Jan 2003
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