Aids and famine claiming Zimbabwean children
FreeAfrica (April 9, 2006)
By: Thabo Siziba

Zimbabwe’s brutal and uncalculated recent campaign by the ruling Zanu P.F regime to establish a bogus operation of destruction called “Operation Murambatsvina” or “Drive Out the Filth” left an estimated 700 000 people homeless and without recourse. The hardest hit by the massive destruction perpetrated by state authorities have been children who have been left abandoned, malnourished and dying.

The operation that officially began last May set to last three months was a result of direct approval by the regime’s leader, Robert Mugabe. People’s homes and small businesses where ransacked and demolished with bulldozers in a crackdown that Mugabe’s regime explained to be a clean up operation on alleged illegal structures. From that time on, the hundreds of thousands, left homeless – a figure estimated by the United Nations in the aftermath – have been scavenging through forests and garbage to survive.

Pediatricians in the two main cities of Harare and Bulawayo told international news media severe child malnutrition had doubled over the past year and hospital morgues were piled high with bodies people could not afford to bury.

An average of 20 corpses of newborn babies have been reported found either thrown down toilet holes or dumped away in forests and garbage sites.

Inflation has reached 1,000 percent and the regime’s seizure of 95% of commercial farms has seen food production plummet. The famine has been hidden by the AIDS epidemic, with more than a quarter of the population now HIV-positive. One Bulawayo surgeon who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions by Mugabe’s police State described the situation by saying “Simply… People are dying of AIDS before they can starve to death”.

Faced with desperate drug shortages, an ailing medical infrastructure and low salaries, many medical personnel have quit their jobs for better paying ones in neighbouring countries like South Africa and Botswana, while others have emigrated to European countries.

According to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), three babies in Zimbabwe become infected with HIV every hour. "We are familiar with the decline in the life expectancy - Zimbabwean adults and children are among the most vulnerable in the world," said UNICEF spokesman James Elder. "Not nearly enough people are receiving ARVs."

More disturbing is the fact that more and more young girls, some in their early teens and even as young as 10, have resorted to selling their bodies just to survive through the next day. Men will pay for sex and a many really condemn themselves and their partners to death because just as well as famine is, the HIV virus is sweeping the country.

Simply put, sex is on sale for food…