By RW Johnson, Harare
SUFFER the little children is a phrase never far from your mind in today's Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully thin street kids milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11million or less, there are an estimated 1.3 million orphans.
Go to one of the overflowing cemeteries in Bulawayo or Beit Bridge, and you are struck by the long lines of tiny graves for babies and toddlers.
Hyena attacks on humans, previously unheard of, are increasingly common.
"So many babies, not all of them dead, are being dumped in the bush that hyenas have developed a taste for human flesh," a game ranger said.
A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last year, compared with fewer than 1000 a decade ago.
A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe, and the majority of deaths are a direct result of government policies.
Ignored by the UN, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur's and more than twice as large as Rwanda's.
The situation is as described in the UN Convention on genocide, which defines it as "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part".
Reckoning the death toll is difficult. Had demographic growth continued normally, Zimbabwe's population would have passed 18million by the end of last year. But people have fled in large numbers, with 3million heading for South Africa and an estimated further 1million scattered around the world.
This would suggest a current population of 14million. But even the Government, which tries to make light of the issue, says only 12million are left in Zimbabwe.
Social scientists estimate the population at between 8million and 11million. But even if you accepted the Government figure, 2million people are "missing", and the real number is probably 3million or more.
The number is escalating as the effects of years of malnutrition and abuse take their toll. And all this is happening in what was until recently one of Africa's most prosperous states and a member of the Commonwealth.
Such comfort abruptly vanished after 2000, when President Robert Mugabe launched farm transfers and a political terror campaign to counter a rising tide of opposition.
Bulawayo, capital of Matabeleland, is a virtual ghost town, for emigration and starvation have drained its lifeblood.
Matabeleland, the centre of opposition to Mugabe, was the first to experience his iron fist in the mid-1980s and has taken more punishment in recent years.
Last year, in common with the rest of the country, it was the target of Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for "drive out the filth") in which the police and army destroyed shanty towns and cracked down on unlicensed traders after Mugabe decreed that they needed to be forcibly "re-ruralised" to regain their peasant roots. About 2million people were affected.
Just what that meant becomes clear from the study carried out by the Reverend Albert Chatindo, whose parish, Killarney, lies on Bulawayo's northern side.
Here, 217 families (1300 people) whose houses had been demolished crowded into his church hall - only for the army to load them into trucks and dump them in the middle of the bush without food or shelter. A few made it back to Killarney, but half are dead, the children from exposure and malnutrition.
Others tell me in hushed tones of the latest atrocity, Operation Maguta (live well), prompted by a shortfall in maize production since the whites' commercial farms were destroyed.
Under Maguta, the army descends on villagers on communal land to compel them to grow maize and sorghum, which they must then sell to the army-run Grain Marketing Board.
In Matabeleland, where maize does not grow well, the army has gone in hard, beating peasants who resist, raping women chopping down orchards and tearing up vegetable patches.
The outspoken views of Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archbishop of Matabeleland, have earned him several death threats. But he refuses to stay quiet. "I am perfectly willing to die," he said.
I ask him about the infamous statement by Mugabe's henchman (and boss of the secret police), Didymus Mutasa, in 2002, that "we would be better off with only 6million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people".
Is the Government trying to reduce the population? Ncube shakes his head slowly. "What is going on is truly evil but I do not think they set out to kill people, it is just that they do not care.
"Their only concern is to stay in power and enrich themselves and to turn people into terrified, compliant subjects ... Mugabe is a murderer and also a traitor - he is selling the country to the Chinese. It is lonely to be the only one to say that."
Harare's northern suburbs are as beautiful as ever - tall trees, wonderful plants and flowers and luxuriant birdlife.
But death is all around. As I drive through the suburbs I see inert bodies lying on the kerb and in the grass, bodies which have not changed position when I come back half an hour later.
Harare, being the capital, you also see the luxurious Mercedes and SUVs of the ruling Zanu-PF elite and their business allies.
Despite the horrendous death toll, the Archbishop is right. This is not a genocide like that in Rwanda, where about 900,000 people were butchered in an orgy of tribal hatred. Instead, the regime's key motive at every stage has been its own maintenance in power.
From 2000 on, it destroyed commercial agriculture because it saw the white farmers and their workers as support for the opposition to Mugabe.
The evictions had the effect of collapsing the economy and cutting the food supply far below subsistence level in every subsequent year.
About 29 per cent of sexually active Zimbabweans are reckoned to be HIV-positive and the economic collapse has devastated the health system and stopped the distribution of anti-AIDS drugs.
World Health Organisation figures show life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which was 62 in 1990, had plummeted to 37 for men and 34 for women by 2004. These are by far the worst such figures in the world.
Yet Zimbabwe does not even get on to the UN agenda: South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, who has covered for Mugabe, uses his leverage to prevent discussion. How long this can go on is anyone's guess.
Mugabe - and, to a considerable extent, Mbeki - have already been responsible for far more deaths than Rwanda suffered, and the number is fast heading into realms previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann.
The Sunday Times
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