Programme extract for The Observer
Extract from Aidan Hartley's report from the frontline:
April 2009: I'm in Zimbabwe. A man whose leg has been shattered by a bullet is lying in a lake of his own gore. My producer is a trained medic. He gives his camera to me and sets to work to stop the bleeding - clamping the femoral artery, tightening the tourniquet until the man screams. It will save his life but not his leg. And a striking truth presents itself. The bleeding man is the victim of Robert Mugabe's early preparations for his next election campaign.
A worker on one of the commercial farms being destroyed in a fresh wave of invasions unfolding as you read this, the man's only crime was to oppose the president's ZANU-PF party in the countryside. Mugabe's method of democracy is to wipe out Zimbabwe's capacity to produce food so that the aid agencies arrive with humanitarian aid - to be distributed of course by ZANU-PF. Mugabe, a president who has held power for nearly as many years as the average life expectancy of his people (34 for women, 37 for men, against his current 85) aims to starve his people into voting for him rather than the opposition MDC.
By polling day this project will have been completed. As voting starts, international observers will arrive in their gleaming white Landcruisers. They will note irregularities, express concern at the stuffing of ballot boxes, issue a communiqué and fly home business class. For the people left behind it will not matter if polls are rigged and the MDC supporters are murdered. Mugabe and the dictators like him will say the voting has conferred on them the right to power. One day soon Zimbabwe may have free elections. Just not yet.
Copyright Aidan Hartley 2009
The rest of Aidan Hartley's article is available to read in the programme for The Observer, on sale at £2 from the NT Bookshop and the Cottesloe Bookstall at performance times.
Contents also include: THOMAS CAROTHERS, in The Observers Observed, describes how election observers work; plus who's who in the cast, and Nobby Clark's photographs of them in rehearsal.
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