Saturday August 2, 2003 6:39 PM
By ANGUS SHAW
Associated Press Writer
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - Zimbabwe's economic disaster is
horrifyingly evident in the morgue at Harare Central Hospital, packed to more
than three times capacity with the dead that relatives can't afford to bury.
The morgue, designed for 164 corpses, holds nearly 600.
Trays in the morgue often hold more than one adult body, along with the tiny
corpses of infants. Others, shrouded in canvas and cotton sheets, lie in gurneys
or on the floors of the refrigerated corridors.
Some of the unclaimed cadavers are those of vagrants found dead on the streets.
Others are the victims of violence kept for as long as three years during police
investigations, often delayed by fuel shortages and logistics problems amid Zimbabwe's worst political and economic crisis since independence
in 1980.
Many of the corpses are awaiting collection by impoverished relatives, including
some who ``just disappear and abandon them'' in hopes they will be given decent
``paupers' burials'' by the city, said Dr. Chris Tapfumaneyi, the hospital's
medical superintendent.
As a result of the crisis amid rising mortality rates, Tapfumaneyi said Friday
hospital officials have decried to give dozens of the bodies to the city's
medical school.
The hospital recently donated 42 cadavers to the Zimbabwe University medical
school, the first such donation for at least three years, he said. The medical
school has promised a proper burial of the remains after they're used for
teaching purposes.
In a nation plagued by a hunger crisis and an estimated 5,000 AIDS-related
deaths a week, funeral homes hired to bury the unclaimed dead also are
overwhelmed.
At the same time, city authorities have run out of money and gasoline,
paralyzing ambulance, garbage collection and other services.
Zimbabwe is suffering massive inflation and unemployment. A hard currency
shortage has led to shortages of food, medicines and fuel, which has crippled
industry.
A routine burial - including cemetery and grave fees, a casket and
transportation - costs at least $120 at the official exchange rate or less than $40 at the black market rate.
That's twice what the average Zimbabwean's annual income and
is well out of reach of the 70 percent of people here living in poverty. Most
rural poor bury their dead on family plots in the bush, following African
spiritual traditions.
As the Harare municipal cemeteries filled with AIDS victims in recent years, a
raft of suggestions - for mass graves, for bodies to be buried vertically, and
for cremation - were met with outcry by political and tribal leaders.
White Zimbabweans of Indian descent favor cremation, but in June, Harare's
cash-strapped city council ran out of imported gas for the furnaces at its only
crematorium.
Since, private funeral homes have accumulated nearly 100 bodies due for
cremation. A few bodies have been taken to the second city of Bulawayo's
diesel-fired crematorium.
But diesel fuel, like regular gasoline, is also in short supply, and Bulawayo's
ordinances make it difficult to cremate a person who did not live there.
Leaders of Harare's tiny Hindu community, meanwhile, have said they are
considering waiving strict religious rules to allow non-Hindus to be cremated in
their small diesel-fired crematorium here.