CONTENDERS: Mugabe and (below) Tsavangirai

Zimbabwe will have presidential elections on March 9 and 10, and its future depends greatly on what happens then. Ever since the country won independence from Britain in 1980, Robert Mugabe has been its president. Now he faces the greatest challenge of his political career from Morgan Tsavangirai, head of the principal opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Mugabe has reacted to prospects of losing power in a manner the world is trying to leave behind. He has bent the rules to suit himself, and unleashed a campaign of terror against Tsavangirai's supporters. Tsavangirai himself faces a charge of treason for allegedly conspiring to kill Mugabe.

In Zimbabwe, the president is directly elected for a six-year term. Mugabe won unopposed in 1996. His party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) formed the government. However, in elections to the 150-member Parliament in June 2000 that foreign observers said it had rigged, the ZANU-PF won 48.6 per cent of the vote to the MDC's 47. Mugabe has reason to be running scared this time.

Ethnic genocide and economics are prime reasons for his fall in popularity. The Economist magazine estimates unemployment in Zimbabwe at 60 per cent and inflation at 116 per cent. If the elections are fair, Mugabe faces certain defeat. They won't be: opposition rallies have been banned, MDC supporters killed, the press gagged and "insulting" the president made an offence. For good measure, the Electoral Commission has been staffed with ZANU-PF loyalists.

Zimbabwe is in for unrest.

-Samrat Choudhury

NARCO TRADE
Drugs On a High

GROWTH SECTOR : An Afghan poppy field

Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of illicit opium and contributes over 70 per cent of the total. It is a crop that the rest of the world wants as little of as the mercenary remnants of its many wars who go by the name of "Afghan alumni". Yet preventing the cultivation and eventual export of opium and its processed derivative, heroin, are currently beyond the powers of the Afghan Interim Administration and its circumstantial friends, the US.

To grow poppy requires about a quarter of the water wheat does. It also pays 25 times more. There has been a prolonged drought in the country and farmers are in a desperate situation. The Afghan Interim Administration may have banned its cultivation, but in Helmland province where half of Afghanistan's poppy is grown, the authorities have said they will not enforce the ban this season. The poppy addiction will take some quitting.

Foreign Count Up

The number of people in the United States with roots outside the country is the highest ever now. A US census report shows that in 2000-end, 56 million residents were foreign born. In other words one in five US citizens was born elsewhere. The ethnic Indian immigrants, among the biggest beneficiaries of a relaxed immigration regime in the 1990s, contributed 1.07 million to this number. There now are 1.7 million people of Indian origin in the US, catapulting them from 12th-largest ethnic group in the 1990 census to fourth behind Mexicans, Chinese and Filipinos. The it boom in the 1990s triggered this alteration in the demographic pattern. Now that it has all but petered out and the US economy is floundering in recession, emigrating Indians may start looking for a new favourite destination.

-Anil Padmanabhan