Friday 9 May 2008

By John Newton and John Pontifex
 
The Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need has just paid out emergency aid for abandoned children in Zimbabwe.

The $30,000 emergency package, despatched this week, will provide medicine and food for more than 500 youngsters – many of them orphans – being cared for by religious Sisters in the Archdiocese of Bulawayo, in south-west Zimbabwe.

The aid package – the second to be sent to the orphanage within 13 months – comes amid worsening reports of the people’s desperation, with numbers of migrants fleeing Zimbabwe having shot up since the Presidential elections in March.

A refugee from Zimbabwe named ‘Timothy’ reported to Aid to the Church in Need that increasing numbers of people were risking life and limb to escape starvation, rape and murder.

He described how people wanting to escape Zimbabwe were being eaten by crocodiles lurking in the Limpopo river crossing. On the river bank is an electric razor-wire fence running for kilometres. 

He added that people were being robbed by armed gangs in forests around Limpopo.

ACN has received other reports of how hundreds of people have been beaten up and many homes have been burnt by supporters of embattled President Robert Mugabe.

As the crisis deepens, ACN is providing key support for Church-run relief programmes and the charity expects to make a further emergency aid payment shortly. 

The charity expects to pay more than $250,000 in aid for Zimbabwe over the course of 2008 – including support for leadership training courses and AIDS prevention programmes.
 
‘Timothy’, the refugee from Zimbabwe who spoke to ACN, emphasised the need for emergency aid.
He said, “You can’t get much food, whatever food there is is taken and sold to the other countries while people are starving.”

Meantime, Thandi Hadebe, of Jesuit Refugee Services told ACN how the number of people fleeing Zimbabwe for South Africa was “increasing daily”.

Up to three million Zimbabweans are reported to have entered South Africa illegally, with up to 2,000 people being repatriated every week.

Unaccompanied children make up 20 percent of them, according to some figures.

Frequently unable to obtain official asylum status in South Africa, refugees face indifference or even harassment from police and bitter resentment from local people.

In March, a Zimbabwean man living in a slum outside Pretoria was burnt to death by a mob.

[ACN]