HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 23 (UPI) -- Harare, after the declaration of President Mugabe's re-election 10 days ago, is a city sick at heart. The fanfare of his inauguration simply passed most people by here, as did Mugabe's usual tirades against colonialism, Britain and whites in general.
Almost everyone in the capital voted against him; the official voting figures show sizeable minorities voting for the president in all the Harare constituencies, but these are almost certainly bogus votes, added in to make things look better.
What is quite indubitable is that many more in the capital would have voted against Mugabe had they been able to -- but given the reduction in the number of urban polling stations this was simply impossible. Many waited 10,15 and 20 hours in queues to vote and still failed to do so in the end.
The worst place of all was the Harare township of Budiriro. Here the number of polling stations was reduced so that each voter had 5.6 seconds in which to vote. Even when the courts ordered the polling stations to stay open another day, they opened five hours late there.
But Budiriro authorities still seemed to find the sight of vast queues of opposition voters provoking so the police were sent in to harrass the voters. They set up a vast wire cage in the blazing heat of the sun and then began to grab people and throw them in it, accusing them of trying to vote twice. There was no evidence, no formal charge -- it was just a way of tormenting them and being able to throw doubt on the poll here. I spoke to people through the wire strands, some of them all day without water. Some had not even been standing in queues when arrested: one woman, the wife of a local preacher, had been pulled out of her kitchen and thrown into the cage.
Some people have cursed rural voters for being credulous enough to vote for Mugabe again. Others have just shrugged and said people were afraid, one can't blame them. But for many the notion of ever getting rid of Mugabe had become hard to believe. After 22 years he's just a fixture. "Mugabe is our king, you don't elect a king," said Didymus Mutasa, organization secretary of the ruling party ZANU-PF, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.
Many foreign observers and even some correspondents asked me: do you expect trouble, mass disorder in the streets? My answer, having spent much of the last three years in Zimbabwe, has been always no. It's not just that the Shona, the dominant tribe, are a passive and patient people. More to the point, people are scared, battered, hungry, consumed by the need to stand in almost equally long queues for mealie meal (maize), sugar, cooking oil, soap, milk or candles, usually without finding them.
The Amani Trust, which exists to help torture victims, defines trauma as torture, severe beating or being forced to watch your family members suffering similarly or being raped/killed. On that definition 30 percent of all Shona over the age of 30 have suffered trauma, and among the minority Ndebele the figure rises to 50 percent.
So it's not surprising that the general strike, which began Wednesday, has seemd thinly supported. And when the president's youth militia goes on the rampage in the middle of town, people scatter and run even though those who voted against Mugabe must outnumber their opposites by 10 to one or more in any street situation. For those who can choose, this is just a reason not to go into the center of town.
People are desperate for jobs, for the means to feed their families: political protest comes low on the list. Many whites and those blacks who can are planning to leave and smuggle themselves into South Africa or Botswana if they can. Salvation, in such a situation, is individual. Already old people are dying from hunger in thousands a week and there are reports from all over the country of children fainting in school for lack of food. It seems unlikely that Mugabe or the ZANU-PF elite who run the country care much about this. They are insulated against such things themselves and the really top people are profiting from the blood diamonds trade from the Congo or Angola.
It is all unbearably sad. Despite its run-down center and its endlessly potholed roads Harare is a beautiful city: tall trees, wonderful vegetation, large gardens. Walking in the center one is endlessly accosted by curio sellers who have hardly seen a tourist in months. When you tell them you don't want to buy their wares they switch immediately to telling you how many hungry children they have.
In part this terrible sadness stems from the fact that so many believed -- briefly -- that Mugabe might be beaten. But this disappointment and anti-climax is greatly added to by a conviction that only external forces will be effective in getting Mugabe out... and that the rest of the world doesn't seem to care.
"The news that the Commonwealth has suspended Zimbabwe is good," one Movement for Democratic Change (opposition) supporter told me, "but we need real help now, not gestures. The President is a torturer and murderer and his supporters are taking revenge all round the country on those who voted against him. Even people like me, who have fought with all I've got against him have now to think of my wife and kids. Should we run? If so where to? Surely it would be easier and cheaper for the world to help now than have to pick this country up from the dead later on?"
