ZIMBABWE: Zimbabwean officials are denying President Robert Mugabe's opponents access to food aid programmes, according to Human Rights Watch.
The New York-based pressure group said in a statement yesterday that international relief agencies were allowing political manipulation of food aid in some places by relying on local authorities to determine who needed food.
"Government authorities and party officials of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front manipulate the supply and distribution of government-subsidised grain and the registration of recipients for international food aid," Human Rights Watch said.
It said its 51-page report, Not Eligible: The Politicisation of Food in Zimbabwe, also catalogued how food aid was being denied to farmers resettled on land bought or seized by the government from white commercial farmers.
It said Mr Mugabe's government did not wish to admit that resettled farmers needed food aid because that would suggest that the land programme, which prompted an outcry when pro-Mugabe militias attacked some farmers and workers, had failed.
"If the farms are not productive and people are hungry, the government's land reform programme will look like a failure," Mr Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division, said in the statement.
"It seems that the government is manipulating relief efforts, and that the international community is playing along even though people on the resettled farms need food desperately."
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) aims to feed four million of an estimated 5.5 million Zimbabweans needing aid this year, and says it has stymied attempts to manipulate it.
"The WFP has been very clear with the government in Zimbabwe in that we will tolerate no attempts to politicise our food aid," southern Africa spokesman Mr Michael Huggins said.
"Whenever there has been an incident we have immediately closed down the distribution."