Escape From Zimbabwe.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

The Air Zimbabwe flight from Harare landed at London's Gatwick airport. Sixteen single young black men and women filed off the plane and were met by immigration officials, who wasted no time poring over their papers. When the vetting process was over, all 16 of the young Zimbabweans were sitting forlornly near the immigration counter. A few hours later, they took seats on the same plane and were flown back to Harare--their savings gone, their dream of escaping from President Robert Mugabe's repressive regime shattered, at least for the time being.

Many will simply try again. Since 1998, when Mugabe made unbudgeted payouts to party militants and sent the economy into a death spiral, his countrymen have been fleeing en masse. And since the flawed presidential election this past March, the exodus has only intensified. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most of the people leaving are not the white "racist" ex-Rhodesians that the state propaganda machine decries. Rather, they are educated, middle-income Zimbabweans, the cream of the country's work force. "I'm scared now," says Agnes Moyo, a 44-year-old bank executive who is shortly to leave for a new job in South Africa. "It's not normal to spend five hours in a queue for maize meal [the national staple]. It's not normal to arrest journalists all the time. It is not normal for people to be killed for voting for who they want. It's simply not acceptable."

So it's off to London--Harare North in local parlance--or to South Africa. There are no reliable statistics on the number of people who've left Zimbabwe over the last two or three years, but there is no question that the figure is large: in the first five months of this year, South Africa alone repatriated 20,397 Zimbabwean border crossers. Demographers estimate that there are more than 1 million Zimbabweans living illegally in South Africa and about 300,000 in Britain. There is much talk in London of Zimbabweans who've slipped through the immigration net on their second or third try (in order to gain legal residency, immigrants must prove they are capable of supporting themselves--a condition few of the arrivals are able to meet). ASA Consultants, a migration-advisory service from Australia, put an advertisement in a Harare ...