With all eyes on the Liberian tumult, it was easy to miss a more subtle disaster in another corner of Africa last week. Zimbabwe's Supreme Court green-lighted the trial of Morgan Tsvangirai, the country's opposition leader, on charges of treason. This is the latest of several fits and starts in President Robert Mugabe's attempt to silence his loudest critic. But the opposition will not settle down--even if Tsvangirai is convicted (and executed) on trumped up charges of trying to execute the president--until Mugabe steps down.
 
    In response to Mugabe's corrupt and undemocratic rule, Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change have called for strikes and denounced despotism. That has landed him in jail several times since April, when Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of rigging the 2002 election that extended his 22-year rule. Mugabe and the MDC have not been in contact since then.
 
    Zimbabwe, a former paragon of African industrialization, has melted into a simmering economic and political hell. The poverty-stricken population is enduring severe fuel and food shortages. The government recently printed a new currency to offset the 365 percent inflation rate that has made smaller denominations worthless. And Mugabe has seized huge parcels of white-owned farms in the name of "equitable land reform," handing out the spoils not to destitute peasants, but to inept cronies and party hacks. Many have let the land lie fallow. Thankfully, the MDC is a nonviolent party. The country has not become another Liberia.
 
    Yet to many Zimbabweans and African leaders, disenchantment with Mugabe's mismanagement doesn't mean sympathy for Tsvangirai. Because much of the Western world has embraced Tsvangirai's reformist politics--particularly after the seizures of white-owned land--many in the country see him as a tool of foreigners (read: whites). Meanwhile, Mugabe is still revered as one of Africa's greatest anti-colonial freedom fighters, and he has portrayed his political problems as an extension of that cause. Many African leaders would support the MDC but don't want to diminish Mugabe's history.
 
    Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president, is one of those leaders. While President Bush has almost no leverage in Zimbabwe--there will be no regime change from afar like Liberia's--Mbeki has plenty. South Africa is a major provider of Zimbabwean electricity and water, which it could use to force Mugabe and the MDC back to the negotiating table. Intervention is clearly in Mbeki's interest: An estimated two to three million Zimbabwean refugees have already fled to South Africa. That is only a shadow of the humanitarian crisis that would ensue if Mugabe's government really collapsed.
 
    Bush used his trip to South Africa in July to force the issue on Mbeki, who assured him that talks were progressing and that South Africa would mediate through back channels. That, apparently, has not happened. The two parties are as far apart as ever, and though Mugabe has hinted he may step down at some point, he has never been forthcoming with details. He even demanded that Tsvangirai "repent" before entering negotiations.

    Zimbabwe's impoverished masses will not see relief until the nation enjoys democratic rule through new, uncorrupted elections. That seems unlikely to come soon, given Tsvangirai's sedition charge. With Liberian mayhem subsiding, Bush has enough clout on the continent to pressure South Africa--as well as the two Zimbabwean combatants--to find a peaceful solution.

 
    NEW YORK -- In the waiting room of Zimbabwe's mission to the United Nations, posters advertise the country's natural wonders, including wild elephants and the splendid Victoria Falls, with the caption "Africa's Paradise."
 
    Yet in today's Zimbabwe what looms large is not paradise but famine. "The situation is deteriorating fairly rapidly," says Kevin Farrell, country director for the U.N.'s World Food Program, reached by phone in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. He says that in any village right now, "you will see people clearly hungry." The U.N. is appealing for $611 million worth of emergency aid for sub-Saharan Africa. Almost half of that is for Zimbabwe, the region's former breadbasket, where aid workers now predict that without massive help, hundreds of thousands may soon starve to death. But, as Rev. Jack Finucane of the U.S.-based Concern Worldwide, told me after his recent visit to Zimbabwe, "There's a problem about getting food into the country."
 
    There is nothing natural about this. True, Zimbabwe has had a drought. But in our modern world of swift transport and global markets -- supplemented in a crisis by eager aid agencies -- there is no way that famine can be chalked up to natural disaster. Given any reasonable degree of freedom, people will make mighty use of their own ingenuity to survive. It takes a lot of work, by determined tyrants, to starve human beings to death.
 
    Stalin in the 1930s, Mao in the 1950s and '60s and North Korea's totalitarian Kim Jong Il today all belong on the list of rulers who have forced starvation on their own people in the course of consolidating their own power. Ethiopians starved in the 1980s under the brutal Marxist rule of Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was finally ousted in 1991 -- and retired to luxury digs in Zimbabwe, where he still resides.
 
    At Zimbabwe's U.N. mission hangs a portrait of the ruler who has enrolled this once-fruitful country in the axis of famine: "His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe" -- Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
 
    Mr. Mugabe peers out from behind big dark-rimmed spectacles, looking younger in this official portrait than his 78 years. He has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, tightening his grip over time. As some countries in Africa have begun to liberalize, Zimbabweans have been looking more urgently for change. Mr. Mugabe has responded with increasingly destructive tactics for keeping power -- imposing price controls, nationalizing enterprises and turning loose gangs to brutalize opponents.
 
    In March, Mr. Mugabe "won" re-election in a vote that the State Department said was "marred by disenfranchisement of urban voters, violent intimidation against opposition supporters, intimidation of the independent press and the judiciary and other irregularities."
 
    Over the past two years, Mr. Mugabe's bid to boost his waning support has included a land "reform" in which his government ordered commercial farmers belonging to the 1% white minority to quit farming and surrender their land to be parceled out to blacks. This was done in the name of redressing racial injustices of colonial times. But the huge farms and their economies of scale were the most productive source of the country's food. Their confiscation, carried out in many cases by violent mobs, has brought food production to a near halt. And though the drought ended months ago and many of the reservoirs are now full, Mr. Mugabe's "reform" means there is now almost no effective irrigation or new planting. The worst hit by these ruinous tactics are huge numbers of Zimbabwe's 12 million blacks.
 

    Nor can people buy supplies on the open market. The government runs a Grain Marketing Board that has monopoly rights to import and deal in commodities such as corn -- the staple food in Zimbabwe. Farmers are forced to sell exclusively to the state marketing board, at well below world price, which further reduces incentives for large-scale planting. According to the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, the grain board "has politicized the distribution of food," funneling grain toward Mugabe supporters and away from the opposition.
 
    Mr. Mugabe's policies have also sent inflation into the triple digits, eroding the buying power of ordinary Zimbabweans. The official exchange rate is now about 1/16th the black-market rate, meaning that food prices are increasingly out of reach. The effect is a "mass destruction of the middle class," says Mr. Natsios. In neighboring South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned that "Zimbabweans are now suffering the brunt of policies that could soon spill over into the entire region."
 
    Aid donors are now trying to maneuver emergency rations through Mr. Mugabe's horrific political maze, which has included objections by Harare officials to the importation of genetically modified grain. The U.N. has issued a call for swifter relief to avert catastrophic starvation, and nongovernmental organizations have been petitioning officials in Harare for permission to ship in food. Mr. Mugabe, meanwhile, was off in Cuba last week, lauding what he calls his "fast track" land policy and hobnobbing with his old pal Fidel Castro -- another septuagenarian believer in the power of rationing.
 
    By phone from Zimbabwe last week, a relief worker described to me the scene in village after village, saying that though people still look healthy, they are now running through their last resources. They are selling off the cow or the goats, boiling roots for food, and waiting in mile-long queues at local offices of the state's Grain Marketing Board.
 
    The relief worker described an old Zimbabwean woman who came with hundreds of others to a foreign aid center near a village school. She said that almost everyone she knows is getting desperate: "We beg, we borrow, we look for food." In hunger, if nothing else, she added, "we are all equal now.'
 

    Francis Bok hasn't seen many movies, but he has a favorite -- "The Ten Commandments." As an escaped slave from Sudan, he says he identifies with the film's characters, who are delivered from the ravages of slavery to the joys and responsibilities of freedom.
 
    For Mr. Bok, who now lives near Boston, watching the film is both exhilarating and painful. "Moses said, 'Let my people go!' and God opened the sea," he says. "But for my people, the sea has not yet opened."
 
    And so the 23-year-old is on a mission: He rallies crowds at churches, meets with members of Congress and hits radio and TV talk shows to remind America that slavery still exists.
 
    Humanitarian groups charge that the Arab Muslim-dominated government in northern Sudan supports a slave trade targeting black villagers in the south.
 
    Mr. Bok's story rings true with U.N. officials as well as several Sudanese, though it couldn't be independently confirmed. It's "consistent" with other reports from the region, says Peter Crowley of Unicef's office for emergency programs. Piyo Tem Kuag, a distant relative of Mr. Bok's who served as a chief in the area where Mr. Bok lived as a boy, says he recalls that young Francis was reported missing by an uncle in 1986. Mr. Kuag, who now works in food service at a Fairfax, Va., hospital, says he helped Mr. Bok make it to the U.S.
 
    On May 15, 1986, he said, he went to the market to sell eggs, when hundreds of Arabs from the government-armed militia swept through on horseback, shooting the men or cutting off their heads with swords. Mr. Bok said most of his family was killed or abducted, and that women and children were grabbed and taken north to be slaves.
 

    Just before President Bush left for Africa, the U.N. warned that at current rates it would take black Africa 150 years to reach the minimum development targets. Growth rates are negative on a continent littered with collapsed states.
 
    Africa needs help but that help is not measured quantitatively by the size of aid packages or promises. When President Clinton visited Africa in 1998, his caravan was chock-full of promises and new initiatives. By contrast, the Bush trip offered substance and form: a $15 billion Emergency AIDS Relief package, 20% directed at prevention, and a $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account in aid to developing countries that demonstrate results in better governance. President Bush correctly recognized that what Africa needs is straight talk, tough love. Short of recolonization, there's only so much he can do to help unless Africa's leadership is willing to get serious about tackling its innumerable woes.
 
    Africa's begging bowl is punched with holes. What comes in as foreign aid and investment ultimately leaks away. Foreign aid and investment into Africa amount to $18 billion annually. But current accounts are always in deficit and capital flight out of Africa exceeds $15 billion a year. Wars cost $10 billion a year in weapons, damage to infrastructure and social carnage. In 1991 alone, says the U.N., $200 billion was siphoned out of Africa by ruling gangsters and briefcase bandits. For Nigeria, the World Bank estimates that $250 billion flowed into government coffers between 1970-2000, but much of that leaked away. And Zimbabwe's economic collapse had caused more than $37 billion worth of damage to South Africa and neighboring countries. It defies common sense to pour more water into a leaky bucket. But African leaders are simply not interested in plugging the holes.
 
    On his trip, President Bush correctly resisted calls for the insertion of U.S. troops in Liberia. The U.S. can help with the provision of military transport to West African forces. And Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated clearly that southern African leaders must do more to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe. Such straight talk has already started producing some results.
 
    Two days before Mr. Bush left Africa, the Economic Community of West African States announced it will take the immediate leading role of sending into Liberia a force of 1,000-1,500. What took them so long? Equally important was Kofi Annan's statement at the African Union's summit in Mozambique: "The U.N. and the rest of the international community can appoint envoys, urge negotiations and spend billions of dollars on peacekeeping missions, but none of this will solve conflicts, if the political will and capacity do not exist here, in Africa."
 
    However, far more was achieved by President Bush on AIDS than can be measured in dollar terms. When the epidemic first erupted, African leaders were in denial. Many were reluctant to talk publicly about the disease and prevention. Only a few countries have made serious efforts to confront AIDS: Senegal, Ghana and Uganda. Most disappointing has been the failure of South Africa to provide leadership in the campaign against AIDS -- despite its 10% infection rate and its first-rate health-care systems.

    President Bush's straight talk on AIDS will prompt African leaders to speak more openly about the pandemic. But just as Africa takes one step forward, it takes three giant steps back. On July 11, a day before President Bush left for the U.S., Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was elected the new African Union vice-chairman. Imagine! Now, it will take Africa more than 200 years to attain minimum indices of development. And President Bush cannot be blamed for that.
 
Mr. Ayittey, professor of economics at American University in Washington, is the author of "Africa Unchained: the Blueprint for Development," out from St. Martin's Press this fall.

    MAPHATSINDVUKU, Swaziland -- Their father died in 1999, their mother in 2000, both of them from what social workers and village officials believe were complications from AIDS. Since then, Makhosazane Nkhambule, now 16 years old, has been caring for her four younger brothers and sisters in their one-room mud-brick shack.
 
    They sweep the floor of the house and the dirt yard with homemade straw brooms. They try to patch holes in the thatched roof and plug cracks in the mud walls. They fetch water from a well nearly a mile away. They scavenge wood for the fire. They go to an informal school in a neighbor's house.
 
    Makhosazane says they can do everything they need to do, except feed themselves. "I would like to plant corn and vegetables, but we have no money to buy seeds or tools," she says. Her parents' cattle could have helped with plowing, but they have also died. The garden beside the hut and the two-acre field behind it haven't been planted since their mother died.
 
    For two years, the orphans scrounged what they could, asking neighbors for scraps of food and waiting for relatives in distant villages to bring something to eat. Last year, the United Nations' World Food Program came to Swaziland to distribute food to those suffering from the drought that has gripped southern Africa. Although the Nkhambule children had no crops to be killed by drought, they began receiving the food aid. So, too, did thousands of other households where the adults who had been tending the fields have died. Most of the victims likely died of HIV/AIDS, which, according to government estimates, infects more than one-third of adults in this tiny, hilly kingdom.
 
    The Nkhambule siblings, barefoot and wearing dirty, shabby clothes, embody what is being called an entirely new variety of famine. It breaks the historical mold of food crises, according to people who are studying it. It isn't caused by weather, war, failed government policy or crop disease, all of which prevent or discourage farmers from bringing in a harvest. Rather, this is a food shortage caused by a disease that kills the farmers themselves. Recovery won't come with weather improvement, new government policies, a peace treaty or improved hybrid crops. Once the farmers die, there is no rain that will make their empty fields grow.
 
    Across southern Africa, the region of the world hardest hit by AIDS, some seven million farmers have died from the epidemic, according to estimates of governments and relief agencies. This has left many families with no means or experience to do the farming. The continuing AIDS crisis threatens to create chronic food shortages and leave large populations "reliant for their survival on a long-term program of international social welfare," says Alex de Waal, an official with the U.N. commission on AIDS and governance in Africa.

    President Bush yesterday began a five-day trip to Africa, during which he will confront the continent's AIDS abyss. In South Africa, Botswana and Uganda, he will see the human tragedies and the wider drag on national development, as well as local and international efforts to control the epidemic. He will also promote his own $15 billion initiative to fund various AIDS-treatment programs and prevention strategies in Africa and the Caribbean.
 
    What is emerging in Swaziland has researchers ratcheting up the costs of AIDS. While nearby Botswana and South Africa have great mineral wealth and considerable industrial development, Swaziland is a largely agrarian country. In places such as this, AIDS and food shortages are combining to unravel societies and destabilize populations in new ways. "A drought is usually in certain areas of a country, but AIDS is all over. It is an unbelievable impoverishment agent," says Derek von Wissell, the national director of Swaziland's Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS.
 
    He notes that the percentage of women at prenatal clinics diagnosed with HIV skyrocketed to more than 38% in 2002, from just under 4% in 1992. Only Botswana has a higher rate. Over the same period, per capita agricultural production fell by a third, even before the drought took hold last year. The government reports a 54% drop in agricultural production in households where at least one adult member died because of AIDS or other reasons.
 
    In traditional famine, the first to die are usually the weakest, particularly children and the elderly. In the new variety, AIDS strikes at adults in the prime of life, leaving the children and elderly to cope. In Swaziland, the government estimates that more than 15% of children under the age of 15 are orphaned. By 2010, the country forecasts the number of orphans could increase to 120,000, or 12% of the entire population of one million. International aid organizations say that 10% of the nation's households are headed by children, and even more are headed by grandparents too old and weak to work the fields.
 
    Mr. von Wissell says aid workers have found children who haven't had any adult contact for months. He tells of encountering four siblings, led by an 8-year-old, walking naked down a road. Their mother had died, and they had walked 15 miles in search of their grandmother. Mr. von Wissell helped them look and then took them back to their home village, where they were put under the care of the local chief. "We never did find the grandmother," he says.
 
    To help feed and nurture the orphans, the national AIDS council is trying to revive old Swazi social structures. Last year, it persuaded about half of the roughly 350 chiefdoms to set aside a few acres of arable land each to grow food communally for the children. And it is establishing village social centers where the orphans can be fed and have more contact with adults and other children.
 
    In Swaziland, as elsewhere in Africa, the HIV virus has been spread by populations that move frequently between rural homes and jobs in cities, on plantations or in mines. Poor health networks hinder diagnosis, and a scarcity of affordable drugs impedes treatment. Initial efforts at prevention often failed because of ignorance about the disease and how it is spread, as well as a powerful taboo about acknowledging its presence.

    The new variety of famine is forcing international relief organizations to retool their strategies. Food relief is usually considered to be temporary aid, until a country recovers from its shortages. But with AIDS, and the prospect of no quick recovery, food relief becomes long-term care. As the AIDS crisis spreads, food shortages increase. As food shortages increase, so does malnutrition, which makes people more susceptible to diseases stemming from a weakened immune system. Although the drought in southern Africa has eased somewhat since last year, the U.N.'s World Food Program has recently launched another appeal to help feed the region. It is asking donor countries and organizations for $308 million to buy close to 540,000 tons of food, enough to feed 6.5 million people until next June.
 
    In Swaziland, "the drought combined with illness has pushed people over the edge," says Sarah Laughton, the WFP's emergency coordinator in the country. "Even if the rains come, they won't recover."
 
    At a WFP food-distribution center in the southern village of Ngologolweni, women and children gather under a big Mopani tree in a schoolyard to wait for their rations. They are "widows, women abandoned by their men, orphans -- all those who can't plant, who have no resources," says Dudu Ndlangamandla, a member of the local relief committee.
 
    Bags of food from around the world are lined up in neat rows: rice from Algeria, peas from Japan, a corn-soy blend from the U.S. A 14-year-old boy walks over from the school to register for his rations; he lives with his 17-year-old sister. An older woman with her left big toe sticking out through a hole in her tennis shoe also comes down from the school and joins the line. She helps to cook for the schoolchildren, she says, but she can't grow enough to feed her own family of six children since her husband died. She says he was "poisoned." Despite the high prevalence of HIV here, it is rare for someone to admit having it, or for people to acknowledge that relatives died of AIDS. Instead, they use various euphemisms.
 
    At a small community center close to the capital of Mbabane, a kettle of porridge cooks on an outside fire, and a big pot of vegetable soup heats up on a stove inside. This is one of a network of neighborhood locations that offer a warm meal to orphans every afternoon after school, with support from U.N. agencies. "We had been seeing the children scavenging for food in trash cans, and we said we needed to give them a meal to eat," says Janet Aphane, one of 20 local women -- most of them retired teachers, nurses and civil servants -- who prepare the food.
 
    They began a year ago with 30 children a day and are now up to 80. "We have to turn away a lot of children, because our resources limit us," she says. "About 500 children would come if we threw open the doors."
 
    The orphaned children also keep flocking to 73-year-old Mandathane Ndzima in the rural village of Mpathni. They are her grandchildren, 20 in all, who come under her care as her children die one by one. Her youngest son died first, of tuberculosis, a common illness of those weakened by AIDS. Then her oldest son died in a car accident. Then the middle son died, and his wife, too, of tuberculosis. In total, they left 12 children behind. Now a fourth child, a 40-year-old daughter also suffering from tuberculosis, has returned home with her eight children.

    "When my sons were alive, we had enough to eat," Mrs. Ndzima says. They filled the family's plot of several acres with corn and sweet potatoes. After the sons died, the family's few oxen, which pulled the plow, were stolen. This past year, the grandmother and her grandchildren planted only a small portion, without fertilizer, and most of that was lost to the drought. Tall grass grows over the rest of the field. Mrs. Ndzima hopes to cut some and bundle it up to sell as thatch. "If I get enough, maybe I can pay someone to assist us in plowing," she says.
 
    Mrs. Ndzima and her daughter, Moana, sit on a couple of cinder blocks in the middle of their cluster of little houses. Behind them are two cylindrical grain storage bins. At this time of the year, right after the harvest, when her sons were alive and farming, the metal bins would be full to the brim, Mrs. Ndzima says. Now they are empty.
 
    So every month, the grandmother and her grandchildren carry home their ration of food aid: 165 pounds of corn, 11 pounds of beans, a gallon of cooking oil and 11 pounds of the corn-soy blend. In order to get the grandchildren through the month, Mrs. Ndzima says she and her daughter have cut back to two meals a day.