UNICEF: Denying funds to Zimbabwe `hurts kids'

Zimbabwe's are paying the price of attempts to punish their government for its human rights violations, the head of the UN Children's fund said Thursday.

Zimbabwe the world's fourth-highest HIV infection rate and has seen the sharpest rise in child mortality, yet receives just a fraction of the donor funding lavished on its neighbors, Carol Bellamy said.

Donors concerned that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's increasingly autocratic regime would use any assistance for political purposes.

"Look for other ways to make your point," Bellamy said. "Don't take it out on the world's children."

Earlier week, the London-based rights group Amnesty International said the state-run Grain Marketing Board continues to manipulate the distribution of food aid, denying opposition supporters access to maize, the staple for most Zimbabweans, in the run-up to March 31 parliamentary elections.

The campaign has seen accusations of violence and intimidation orchestrated by Mugabe's party.

Bellamy, on her final African tour as UNICEF's executive director, conceded that diversion of aid by the government was a concern in Zimbabwe like elsewhere on the continent. But she said much of the help provided by UNICEF -- including child-sized vaccine doses and school supplies -- was not as easily abused as food aid.

Zimbabwe been gripped by political and economic crisis since the government began seizing white-owned farms in an often-violent land redistribution program in 2000. It has also suffered the devastating effects of successive years of drought and the AIDS pandemic ravaging the continent.

One every eight Zimbabwean children dies before the age of 5, a 50 percent increase since 1990, according to UNICEF figures.

With an estimated 26 percent of the country's 12.5 million people infected with HIV, a child dies every 15 minutes due to AIDS complications. One in five have lost one or both parents -- 1 million of them because of AIDS.

Yet Zimbabwe has received no support from the US President's initiative on HIV/AIDS or the World Bank's MAP initiative for this year and next. And it has received only limited funds from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNICEF said.

Average by the three main donor initiatives in southern Africa, the region most devastated by the AIDS pandemic, is US$74 per HIV-infected person. In Zimbabwe, it is just US$4, it said.

"Some 110 Zimbabweans under 15 will become infected with HIV/AIDS today. Another 110 will be infected tomorrow," said Bellamy.