Background The Solidarity Peace Trust has as part of its mission, the role of providing assistance to Zimbabwean victims of torture and human rights abuses. The Trust has documented the torture of many Zimbabweans who have fled to South Africa as a result of persecution. It has an interest in how these and other Zimbabwean torture victims are faring in their country of refuge - in particular whether tortured political exiles are receiving refugee status and access to health care. We are concerned about their living conditions in South Africa, and their experiences at the hands of South African officials. It is clear that Zimbabweans in South Africa are not readily perceived as having a legitimate right to seek asylum there: the assumption is that there is “no war in Zimbabwe”, and that therefore all migrants from Zimbabwe to South Africa are there for economic reasons, and should be deported. The intention of this report is to raise awareness of why Zimbabweans are pouring into South Africa and the region in their millions, and of the difficulties they are facing, both formal and informal, in the hope that groups including government, non governmental organisations (NGOs) and churches will start developing more coherent policies to deal with the needs and problems of this influx. The only official strategy at this stage seems to be an endless revolving door of deportations at huge expense to the South African public that in any case barely scratches the surface of the numbers of Zimbabweans in South Africa. Support to Zimbabwean exiles is small scale and ad hoc, consisting of a handful of NGOs and churches who are trying to offer basic resources to a few hundred individuals or families. This report does not claim to cover the issue of Zimbabwe’s exiles in exhaustive scientific detail. By their very definition, Zimbabweans exiled in South Africa are fugitives. The vast majority are illegal, without status or papers, subject to deportation. It is difficult to access people who spend much of their time trying to avoid detection, trying to be invisible. Over the last year, the authors of this report have managed to interact with several hundred Zimbabweans in South Africa and their stories of torture and persecution have provided a tragic background against which other sources of information, including previous refugee studies and media reports, have been situated. Exiles have been visited in their places of abode, observed in the streets, and interviewed in the context of church feeding programmes. To build trust has taken months of work and all those who have come forward with their stories are kept anonymous to protect them, unless they have specifically agreed to having their identities revealed, for example in photographs. Even those who would be considered to be in South Africa for primarily economic reasons by officials, view their decision to leave as political. In their own eyes, the collapse of the economy and the loss of livelihoods in Zimbabwe is the result of political mismanagement; with good governance in Zimbabwe, they would not be in South Africa. While this will not win them refugee status with officials in terms of international criteria for what makes a refugee, it should be noted that individuals do see it this way - political decisions made in the last four years in Zimbabwe are what have driven them over the border to take up tough lives in a foreign land. The Trust wishes to draw attention to the fact that lack of access to food by any Zimbabwean may not be a simple matter of poverty and/or crop failure. The current Zimbabwe government has in the last four years used food as a political weapon; the government controls access to maize, particularly in rural areas, and has been documented refusing to allow those perceived to support the political opposition from purchasing maize. The government and its agents have also at times in the last four years interfered with donor feeding programmes for 14