26 Feb 2009

Mugabe splashes out on birthday bash as cholera spirals out of control

Cholera is one of the most visible signs of Zimbabwe's collapse. It has claimed thousands of lives, infected tens of thousands of other people and left millions of impoverished, half-starved Zimbabweans living in fear of their own drinking water.

But Robert Mugabe has tried to make cholera an invisible disease, hiding the dying in hastily erected treatment centres, behind barbed wire and police guards, and burying the victims away from prying foreign eyes. The president declared the epidemic over even as the numbers of dead were growing ever more rapidly, and claimed the spread of the disease was all a British plot.

Now a new Guardian film, smuggled out of the country, reveals what Zimbabwe's autocratic leader does not want seen: the stark reality of life, and death, in the midst of a cholera outbreak that Médecins Sans Frontières only last week called part of a "massive medical emergency that is spiralling out of control".

The Guardian - VIDEO