MDC leaders' fury at UN food decision

MDC leaders' fury at UN food decision

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By Mattias Karen

LEADERS of Zimbabwe's beleaguered opposition said Tuesday a U.N. decision to scale back food distribution to their country would lead to "tragic" consequences while strengthening autocratic President Robert Mugabe's control over the population.

The World Food Program said Monday that the aid reduction was a result of a shortage in donor funds following repeated assurances by Zimbabwe that it would be able to feed itself ahead of the next harvests in March.

The agency estimated 1.4 million Zimbabweans are in critical need of food aid now and predicts the number will rise to nearly 2 million in coming weeks because of soaring inflation and shortages of food on the local market.

Leaders of Zimbabwe's opposition said the aid cut would hurt the population, while strengthening Mugabe, whose policies have helped exacerbate Zimbabwe's deep economic crisis.

"The decision is tragic, in that it will affect the ordinary man and woman in ... some of the most inaccessible areas of Zimbabwe," Tendai Biti, a secretary general for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, told The Associated Press.

Biti and other MDC leaders were invited to Stockholm by the Olof Palme Center, a human rights and peace group named for the murdered Swedish prime minister, but also met with Swedish Aid Minister Gunilla Carlsson to discuss the humanitarian situation in the African country.

Welshman Ncube, another MDC secretary-general, said the U.N. decision would allow Mugabe's government to use its own food distribution schemes as a "political weapon ... and therefore in fact weaken people's capacity to resist the dictatorship."

"That's the tragic consequence of actually pulling back that sort of support," Ncube said. "The food deficits allow them to actually control and manipulate the population."

The WFP said the poor donor response followed repeated assurances by the government that Zimbabwe would be able to feed itself without aid.

"That's what they always say," Ncube said. "But I think the international community should now be familiar with that trick."

Zimbabwe needs about 1.8 million tons of corn a year, but in the last harvest produced less half that amount, according to independent surveys.

The country is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with more than 1,000 percent inflation, the highest in the world, and acute shortages of hard currency and gasoline.

The crisis has been largely blamed on the chaotic and often violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms since 2000 in Zimbabwe, a former regional breadbasket.

Mugabe blames drought, sanctions and his government's isolation by Western nations, donors and investors for the economic crisis.

The Movement for Democratic Change, founded in 1999 as the first significant challenge to Mugabe's rule, narrowly lost parliamentary and presidential elections in 2000 and 2002 in polling independent observers said was marred by violence, intimidation and rigging. - AP
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