In June 2003, five men of Arab provenance were arrested in Blantyre, Malawi, on charges of funneling money to Al-Qaeda. This turned out to be a blunder, with the five men indignantly emerging to tell their story some months later. The Malawi police, they said, had been solely responsible for the mistake and that at no stage in their confinement had the five men so much as met an American. They had been taken to Lilongwe, accused of belonging to Al-Qaeda, and then put on an Air Malawi flight to Lusaka. The flight was, however, redirected to Harare where they were delivered to the Zimbabwean police. They in turn held them for a month before flying them out to Khartoum where the Sudanese government released them. They might have languished much longer in Zimbabwe but for the fact that one of them, Khalif Abdi Hussein, was a Kenyan and that after questions were raised in the Kenyan parliament the Nairobi government announced it had traced them to Zimbabwe. The interesting point here was simply that Bakili Muluzi, the Malawian president, has been a strong supporter of Mugabe and clearly had the idea that Al-Qaeda suspects ought to be turned over to him rather than to the Americans.

In the meantime, of course, both the Mugabe and Mbeki governments had taken a strongly sympathetic line towards Saddam Hussein in the run up to the Iraq War and had denounced the Anglo-American involvement there. Mugabe made it clear indeed that he identified strongly with Saddam and that the Americans were "enemies" who were planning an invasion of Zimbabwe too. When a black Zimbabwean, Christopher Muzvuru, a bagpiper in the Irish Guards, was killed during the British attack on Basra on April 6, 2003, the Mugabe press angrily denounced him as a "traitor" and "sell-out", a "mercenary fighting for an enemy government." When Muzvuru's body was brought back home, the Mugabe government tried to deny it burial, and Zanu-PF activists desecrated the grave.

This past winter, finding myself in Harare again, I was struck by the fact that the U.S. embassy has put up posters offering a $2 million reward for Haroun Fazil--still on the FBI's list of the 21 Most Wanted as the man behind the East African embassy bombings. Quite clearly, the FBI believes either that he may be in Zimbabwe or that there may be people there who know him. I decided that this merited a visit to the Zimbabwean Criminal Investigation Department (CID)--a difficult venture for me since I may be wanted by them myself. But the CID are also the last remaining professional element within the Zimbabwean police, keen to remain in the good books of Interpol.

The CID have their headquarters in a vast police camp adjacent to Mugabe's presidential palace. Having got through the usual road blocks and security guards, I eventually found the office I was looking for, the one with a "Wanted" poster of Fazil from Interpol taped to its door. More interesting, though, was the poster mounted by the CID itself, showing a copy of Fazil's passport. For Fazil traveled to Nairobi to carry out the bombings from Harare and on a Zimbabwean passport. I was tempted to tell the desk officer that he might be able to learn more about that interesting circumstance by enquiring at the presidential palace next door but decided to leave that for another day.

IT IS NOT surprising that Mugabe's failed state should have become involved with terrorists: Mugabe has no scruple in deploying terror tactics against his own people and is desperate for friends and money. Moreover, even his thin list of friends has been rapidly diminishing. He remains on close terms with North Korea, and some of the uranium for that country's nuclear program is believed to have come from Zimbabwe. But with the retirement of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Qaddafi's decision in January 2004 to abandon his WMD program and seek d&ente with the West, it is not clear on whom, other than South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, Mugabe can now rely.

The hounds of hell still roam across Mugabe's lands. The real question is whether the major Western powers will continue to countenance a regime that commits human rights abuses on such a scale, or whether they will take the fairly modest steps required to bring Mugabe's house of cards tumbling down. When the regime does fall--and fall it must--there may be significant implications for the War on Terror, and several new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could fall into place.

R.W. Johnson, former professor of political science and Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford University, is the Southern African correspondent of the Sunday Times (London).