We read this article in the paper and thought how little the world knows what is going on in Africa. When a horrible disaster strikes like the Tsunami in Asia, the world is on alert and people make an effort to help, yet for tragedies of equal or greater magnitude that are not a singular event, the world lays in ignorance.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of a hidden famine and as a United Nations envoy began a tour of the country yesterday, The Independent can reveal a deadly nexus of AIDS, starvation and depopulation of the cities that is sending tens of thousands to a silent death in rural areas.
One month into President Robert Mugabe's brutal campaign of demolition and displacement, which has cost at least 400,000 people their homes and livelihoods, the scale of the humanitarian disaster is emerging. The victims of this forced expulsion - which has been comparred to the devastating policies of Pol Pot in Cambodia - are arriving in the already faminie-stricken country-side, where jobless and homeless, they are waiting to die. Unofficial estimates obtained by The Indepenedent suggest that the death rate is already outstripping the birth rate nationwide by 4000 a week.
The UN has responded to the crisis by dispatching a special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, who arrived in Zimbabwe last night, to assess the position. The Tanzanian official, head of the UN habitat programme, is expected to be taken on a carefully organized visit to urban areas where evidence of the pogrom has been hasitly cleared.
The St Anne's Catholic mission in Brunapeg will not be on her government-controlled tour. The remote outpost, south of Bulawayo, has found itself on the front line of this new battle for survival. A grinding two-hour drive along a rocky dirt track from the main road linking Bulawayo to the Plum Tree border crossing into Botswana, the mission provides the only prospect of medical help for a hundred miles in all directions.
Each day scores of starving and sick people come trekking out of the bush in search of a doctor. Many barefoot and exhausted after walking for up to 12 hours through the night, they form a queue outside the spartan conrete compound.
Dr Pedro Porrino, a Spanish physician who has been working at the mission for three years, says that what is unfolding is an "unprecedented crisis".
"For the first time I am seeing people who are literally starving to death," he says. "There are people asking to be admitted just so they can eat. Out in the bush families are living on one meal a day".
HIV infection rates in Zimbabwe have soared to the highest in the world and in combination with the growing impact of malnourishment - in a country where the UN World Food Programme estimates that four million people need immediate food aid - the effects are devastating.
"Ninety percent of the people I see are HIV-infected," says Porrino.
"Most of the time I wouldn't even need to perform the test, I can see as soon as I look at them that they have HIV. I am seeing men of 25 and 35 weighing 45kg and it's because they have AIDS but it's also because they don't eat at all".
With proper nutrition and medical care, HIV sufferers in the West typically take up to 10 years to develop full-blown AIDS. For the starving Zimbabweans, their immune systems already weakened by malnutrition, the transition is now a matter of months.
"The speed of the transition is related to malnutrition. Every day I am seeing the evidence of malnutrition among non-HIV patients so you can imagine what is happening to HIV-infected people," says Porrino.
A senior consultant surgeon in Bulawayo, who preferred not to be named, said the scale of the AIDS epidemic has so far masked the extent of the famine.
"Put simply, people are dying of AIDS before they can starve to death," he said.
Brunapeg is typical of the drought-ravaged areas into which President Robert Mugabe is driving the urban poor. The hospital and school rise out of the low scrub, the only buildings of any kind for miles around. Rusting petrol pumps stand idle at the filling station, there hasn't been a fuel delivery in Brunapeg for years.
"Now that people are being forced to come out here what's here for them? Nothing," says the Spanish doctor.
"There are so many people here who have never been into town. The only thing they know is to eat and to survive and now they can't even do that."
With the rural famine gaining momentum, the gap between the polictical rhetoric of Mugabe and the situation on the ground has reached surreal proportions.
Mugabe has pronounced himself pleased with the results of the campaign that he has titled Murambatsvina, which means "drive out the rubbish" in Shona.
The wholesale destruction of shanty towns, squatter camps and street markets from the outskirts of Harare to the magestic Victoria Falls, is hailed by the ruling Zanu-PF as an overdue clampdown on illegal settlements and the criminal element on the fringe of society.
The Education Minister, Aeneas Chigwedere, has insisted that "people had been moved to an appropriate place", adding that there is "nobody in Zimbabwe who does not have a rural home".
David Coltart, an MP with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said what had happened was nothing short of a pogrom against the government's opponents.
The state now exercises total control over media and movement inside Zimbabwe. The last two disenting voices, SW Radio Africa and the Daily News have been forced to close. A recent headline in The Chronicle, a goverment mouthpiece, told its readers that Britain was following Zimbabwe's lead and demolishing up to 400,000 homes in a similar clean-up campaign.
Foreign reporters have been expelled and millions of pounds have been spent on strengthening the secret police force, the CIO, in order to infiltrate civil society and opposition groups. In this atmosphere of intimidation and misinformation many Zimbabweans have litlle idea of what is happening outside their immediate surroundings.
In the hospitals of Bulawayo there are no queues to speak of. But the reason is, people are dying before they can reach a city hospital, says consultant surgeon Dr Mike Cotton.
"People have lost confidence in the health service. They don't believe it's worth the time and money to get to a hospital where there is little that can be done for them. They'd rather stay and die where they are," he said.
In antenatal clinics, HIV infection rates are running at 50%. Tests conducted in army barracks show infections rates in excess of 80%.
Zimbabwe is alone among the countries of southern Africa with negative population growth. Official figures out of the population at 12 million. A senior health official, speaking on condition of anonymity said the real figure could be as low as 9.5 million. Average life expectancy in Zimbabwe has plummeted to just 33.
In Brunapeg, Porrino says: "People ask me why they should bother to be tested for HIV. THey ask what I can do for them if they are infected. And I have to tell them the truth: 'Nothing'."
And the doctor has a question of his own: "Does anyone in the outside world know what's going on here? What are people waiting for?" - The Independent.