Mick Hartley

Journalist Jan Raath, after 30 years in Zimbabwe, is finally forced out:

At 11.30am on Wednesday I completed my flight from Zimbabwe. After 30 years in Harare, and a final, frantic overnight drive to the border, I had left the sad, wrecked country that I love, and I don’t know if I will return.

For years President Mugabe’s regime had been making it increasingly difficult to work in Zimbabwe as a journalist, and of the foreign press corps I was one of the last survivors. But this week it become obvious that with an election looming, and Mr Mugabe wishing to steal it with a minimum of prying by the outside world, my time was up as well. […]

When Mr Mugabe was first elected in 1980, he was unlike any African leader. He spoke with a plummy accent and won my heart with his policy of reconciliation between whites and blacks, and between the two sides of the seven- year guerrilla war against the minority rule of Ian Smith’s colonial regime.

But gradually, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the new regime grew more repressive and authoritarian than the one it replaced. In 2000, Mr Mugabe was challenged for the first time, and very nearly beaten. Since then his Government has become blatantly tyrannical, determined to stamp out any opposition, and a byword for misrule.

Most white farms have been seized in the name of land redistribution, and left to rot. Millions of black Zimbabweans now live in hunger and abject poverty, with the country’s dwindling food supplies used as a political tool to reward supporters.

Unbridled inflation has left the currency worthless. The independent media has been silenced. Those who can have abandoned the country in droves.

There has been no joy in recording Zimbabwe’s steady descent into a subsistence economy.