Hostile Refuge
News: Zimbabweans fleeing the brutal pogroms of Robert Mugabe find the border of South Africa a crossing to despair.
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ON A MOONLIT NIGHT beside the Limpopo River, Jethro Moyo steers his Toyota pickup along a wire fence topped by coiled razor wire. The truck's headlights illuminate dense, riverine bush broken by groves of yellow-barked fever trees and spectral baobabs. A family of impala seize in the glare, then clatter off. Moyo points to a hole in the fence, just wide enough to allow a human body to slither through. "I think they just cut this open," he says. He freezes, listening intently, and indicates fresh sandal tracks in the sand. "There are refugees just nearby," he tells me. "They're running away and hiding. They probably think we're the army."
Constructed by South Africa's apartheid regime two decades ago to keep out African National Congress guerrillas, the fence now serves a different purpose: The ANC government, composed of some of those same ex-insurgents, is using it to prevent refugees fleeing Zimbabwe from entering the country. But, as Moyo—a worker at a nearby game ranch—has shown me, it has hardly proved effective. Over the past two years this sparsely populated, 170-mile frontier has become the Rio Grande of Africa: an untamed zone of people smugglers, corrupt security forces, and a ceaseless flow of illicit human traffic across the river.
Moyo, a skinny 39-year-old, is part of that flow. Born in Beitbridge in southern Zimbabwe, he first slipped through the fence into South Africa in 1989, covering himself in a blanket to avoid its lethal electrical current. (In 1994, South Africa's new black government turned off the juice.) Moyo is a legal immigrant now, but he's still sneaking back and forth between the two countries. His Zimbabwean passport expired a year ago, and, with the government refusing to renew it, Moyo must visit his family in Beitbridge clandestinely. That means engaging in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with both the Zimbabwean and the South African armies—the latter of which could revoke his legal status if they caught him coming through the fence. In August 2005, returning from seeing his dying mother, he ran smack into a South African patrol near this spot. "I heard them shouting, ‘Stop!' So I kept running and running," he says. "Somehow, I escaped."
NOBODY KNOWS exactly how many Zimbabweans have snuck into South Africa since 1998, when President Robert Mugabe began expropriating thousands of white-owned farms, devastating his country's agricultural base and causing the economy to implode. If Mugabe could ever claim that his policies were a sort of land reform, those days are long gone. The ongoing Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Rubbish), a so-called slum-clearance effort, has rendered up to 1 million poor black Zimbabweans homeless. Life expectancy, which was 60 when Mugabe first defeated the white government of what was then Rhodesia, has plummeted to 33. Inflation is running at nearly 400 percent, unemployment at 70 percent; cooking oil and gasoline are nearly impossible to come by; 4,000 people a week are dying of AIDS; and 200,000 are at risk of dying of starvation by early this year. Much of the professional class—most critically, teachers, nurses, doctors—has fled abroad. Those who can't afford airfare come over the Limpopo. Human rights monitors estimate that number to be as high as 1.5 million people. Captain Harrie Heslinga, in the South African border town of Musina, told me that each week his men arrest between 500 and 1,000 Zimbabweans, which he estimates to be 10 percent of those who cross into South Africa. "It's getting worse and worse," Heslinga says. "Their country is in chaos, and they see South Africa as the promised land."
In crossing the river, the migrants face flash floods, crocodiles, poisonous snakes, cape buffalo, lions; one refugee told me he watched as a rampaging bull elephant crushed his best friend to death last summer. Once they get to South Africa, the refugees are stalked by South African police who almost every night sweep through the Johannesburg and Pretoria neighborhoods frequented by Zimbabweans. Those arrested can languish for weeks in the notorious Lindela Repatriation Center in Krugersdorp, 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg, before being driven across the Limpopo and dumped back into Zimbabwe. Obtaining official refugee status can take years, and the vast majority don't bother to apply. Human rights groups charge that the South African authorities usually don't differentiate between those who have fled Zimbabwe in search of work and political opponents of the Mugabe regime who, when shipped back, face jail, or even torture or execution.
There is a grim irony to all of this. South Africa's refugee crisis is, to some degree, a problem of its own making. As Mugabe's disastrous policies have sent his country skittering toward economic and social collapse, President Thabo Mbeki has remained largely silent. He refused to criticize the expropriation of white-owned farms, which Mugabe portrayed as a program to empower landless black peasant farmers, but which, critics charge, ended up benefiting his cronies. As Mugabe's policies have grown increasingly barbaric and bizarre—he recently refused food aid, saying, "We are not hungry. Why foist this food on us?"—both Zimbabwean opposition leaders and South African critics have denounced Mbeki's policy of "quiet diplomacy" as one that only encourages the despot's abuses. "Mbeki views Mugabe as the godfather of the African liberation movements," says Steven Paradza, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Political Victims' Association, a Johannesburg-based group that tries to obtain political asylum for refugees. "He is not going to condemn him."
