Zimbabwe Army's deserters underscore country's troubles
President Mugabe has traditionally drawn strong support from the military. But lack of pay and distasteful assignments may be weakening that loyalty.
from the April 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Recruiting loyalists
To fill the gaps, Mugabe has been recruiting people whose loyalty can be trusted, replacing his own Presidential Guard with members of his secret police and filling Army ranks with his party's youth militia and aging veterans of the liberation struggle from the 1970s. Meanwhile, top generals are constructing their own survival strategies, making alliances along tribal and ethnic lines in order to take power – or at least survive – once Mugabe is gone.
"We're moving toward a collapsed state," says Chris Maroleng, a top Zimbabwe expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria (now known as Tshwane). Mugabe's crackdown on the Army "shows that the president is preparing for compromise, for mediation. He is tired, frankly."
To ensure loyalty, Mugabe gives priority to the military at the expense of other ministries, Mr. Maroleng says. "Last week, the Central Intelligence Organization's personnel got a 200-percent pay increase. In a security state, anything is acceptable."
But for a professional soldier like Sgt. Patrick Dube, a platoon sergeant and crew commander with five years of combat experience who fled a couple of months ago, there are some things that are unacceptable.
"We were ordered to vote for the ZANU-PF (Mugabe's party), and there were officers who were monitoring our voting; if you complained about salaries, they said 'You are subverting other soldiers' morale,' " says Sergeant Dube, who fought for nearly five years in a controversial Zimbabwean intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the final straw, says Dube, was when his unit was called to beat up hospital employees striking for higher pay last February.
"The national Army is collapsing, every day the soldiers are running away," he says. "I will never go back. Either I'm going to go to jail [as a result of arrest by South African immigration authorities], or I'll starve to death here."
Peter Shava, a commando from the elite 5th Brigade of the 52nd Battalion who also left a couple of months ago, says his unit was ordered in 2000 to "force white settlers to move off their land. We were armed. The war veterans" to whom the white farmers' land was promised "were not armed. We hit people like hell. They had no choice but to leave."
Corporal Shava found this work distasteful, but "you obey orders. We work under command. You have to do it."
Zimbabwean deserters have been arriving in such numbers that they are beginning to overwhelm the local labor market. On street corners where South Africans and poor refugees of other nationalities used to hawk their services for contractors and gardening services, Zimbabwean soldiers cluster by the dozen. Many are homeless, sleeping in the shrinking spaces between high-priced estates surrounded by 10-ft. walls and electric fencing.
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