Death Haunts a Parched Land

By Marguerite Johnson

Starving thousands take a trail of tears to Zimbabwe

They stumble along on dusty dirt paths. Emaciated, frail and ravaged by hunger, they are on a desperate journey for food. Some are blind, a result of vitamin A deficiency, or sick with pellagra, diarrhea, cholera and various starvation-related diseases. Diplomats and relief officials estimate that as many as 150,000 have walked through the desolate bush of northern Mozambique into eastern Zimbabwe in recent months. For every one who has made it to the border, another is believed to have died along the way.

There has been no rainfall in many parts of Mozambique for three years, and the earth, the grass dwellings and even the sky have turned a deadly ashen hue. International relief officials in the capital of Maputo estimate that 170,000 Mozambicans have died since the drought began. A United Nations situation report issued in early June predicts that Mozambique's famine will probably worsen through the year and reach its most critical stage early in 1985. U.N. officials in Mozambique say that 1.5 million people out of a population of about 13.4 million are already totally dependent on foreign relief supplies.

In many places there is no food to be had at any price. Says Dr. Kate Gingell, a British physician at a hospital in the northern province of Tete: "Money is useless here. You can't buy food that isn't there. So you see people scrabbling through litter for food, and you see people literally dropping dead in the street. People come to die on my veranda." One man told how he and his family hiked for more than a week to get to Zimbabwe from Tete. "There is nothing there," he said of his home territory. "We were walking through villages of death. In village after village, people wanted to come with us, but they were too weak." During the 75-mile journey, two of his four children died.

Many of the refugees simply criss cross the border in search of food, but officials estimate that about 46,000 have remained in Zimbabwe, some of them encamped at bus stations and marketplaces and in fields. The Marymount Mission near Rushinga in northeastern Zimbabwe is serving a daily ration of beans and soup to refugees. Although local Zimbabweans have been generous to the Mozambicans, who are of the same tribe, the Shona, their country is also stricken by drought and there is little food available. However, the U.N.'s World Food Program has agreed to supply Zimbabwe with foodstuffs worth $1 million to feed the refugees. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's government and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have set up three large camps, and plan for two more.

Mozambique's hospitals are overflowing with famine victims. Most are skeletal and silent. At a hospital in the coastal town of Vilanculos, two brothers, Georgio and Joao Simbini, ages ten and 13, lie side by side in a ward filled with emaciated children. They are the only survivors of a family of eleven who walked 65 miles from their village in search of food. Members of a U.S. congressional delegation that toured eight drought-stricken African nations earlier this year were shocked when they got to Mozambique. "There was an immediate disaster taking place," says Missouri Senator John Danforth. "What I saw was acute starvation. Emaciated bodies, sticklike limbs and distended bellies were everywhere we looked." CARE, the international relief organization, has gone into Mozambique to survey the country's needs and coordinate relief efforts. The U.S. has pledged $16 million to buy roughly 66,000 tons of grain, part of a $150 million emergency food appropriation for victims of the African drought in 18 countries.

The immense problems of getting food to remote areas, however, are compounded by the guerrilla war being waged by the estimated 15,000 rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance against the nine-year-old government of President Samora Machel. The insurgents were organized by white-ruled Rhodesia in the mid-1970s. When that country became independent Zimbabwe under black leadership in 1980, South Africa be came the main source of military and other support for the anti-Machel rebels. Since then, they have helped ruin Mozambique's economy by repeatedly sabotaging power lines, cutting off roads leading to the main port of Beira and destroying or damaging rural centers used to distribute food and fertilizer. The bandidos, as the Mozambicans call them, have burned down 100 health centers and clinics, kidnaped and murdered government workers and officials, destroyed supply trucks and, in April and May alone, killed 157 civilian relief workers. In March, Machel signed an agreement with South Africa aimed at stemming the rebel activity. The accord called for South Africa to withdraw its backing for the resistance movement and for Mozambique to end its support of the African National Congress, a fervent opponent of South Africa's racial policies. Yet fighting in Mozambique has intensified.

In recent weeks, 1,600 tons of grain, donated by the Dutch government, as well as medical supplies and clothing, have be gun to arrive by air and road from Malawi. Food and materials are also being sent by boat from Maputo to the coastal towns of Inhambane and Vilanculos. But the problems of distribution are heartbreaking. Says a U.N. official: "When an airlift of grain arrives at a distribution point, there are no trolleys to move it, no pallets on which to stack it and no warehouses in which to store it."

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Maputo