Zimbabwe on edge of total ruin

HARARE, Zimbabwe — This nation was once one of Africa's most prosperous states. But it is prostrate today, its vital signs flickering, asphyxiated by ever-tighter governmental curbs on the economy and basic freedoms.

Driven by desperation, greed or simply a sense that the end is nearing, its rulers and citizens are methodically stripping the country of its assets.

Zimbabwe has been officially off-limits to foreign journalists since February, when President Robert G. Mugabe's government pushed a law through parliament effectively banning outside reporters as tools of European and American critics. But a low-profile tour of the country for 11 days this month found no shortage of domestic critics, both black and white, and an outright glut of human misery.

Desperate citizens here have become dark-of-night scavengers of coffins, copper electrical cable and even aluminum street signs, now in such shortage that finding an address is a trial.

Zimbabwe's nights are dark indeed: Here in Harare, downtown street lights are turned off for lack of foreign currency to pay South African and Zambian power suppliers.

If the nights are black, the days often exude an eerie surface calm. But much of the calm is government-enforced, courtesy of a domestic intelligence organization and a rural youth militia, the Green Bombers, widely feared for its brutality.

Although it went widely unreported, hundreds of factory workers in Bulawayo and Harare clashed violently with the police recently after trying to protest the cruelest of ironies: Zimbabwe's soaring inflation has pushed them into the 45 percent tax bracket once reserved solely for the rich.

A better measure of life is the fenced-off compound of the British and South African High Commissions in Harare's suburbs, where crowds of Zimbabweans camp out nightly, hoping to be first in line when visa offices open the next morning.

The ravages of hyperinflation, 455 percent a year and rising fast, are evident everywhere. It now costs 234,000 Zimbabwean dollars to spay a dog. Chicken feed is anything but: 91,500 for a 110-pound bag, more than twice the price a week earlier.

A gallon of gas costs 11,000, but is only available on the black market. In Victoria Falls, for example, most people go to nearby Botswana to fill up their tanks.

"This country is truly in a crisis," said Collen Gwiyo, the 38-year-old first secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Coalition of Trade Unions, a locus of opposition to Mugabe's government. "It's a political crisis, leading to an economic crisis, feeding a humanitarian disaster."