She delivered him three months early, not uncommon for women with AIDS. She didn't know she was HIV-positive in January, when she arrived in labour at Howard Hospital, and nurses here had no opportunity to treat her tiny son with a drug that would have lowered his risk of infection.

"You have to know he's a fighter," said Paul Thistle, a Scarborough, Ont., doctor who runs this Salvation Army hospital 100 kilometres north of Harare. In the wards here, where three-quarters of the beds, and many pallets on the floor, are filled with gaunt, gasping, listless people with AIDS, few people have energy left to fight.

Zimbabwe's economy is in collapse, the government has no foreign exchange to buy drugs or expertise and the health system is in chaos, with an estimated half of the adult work force having fled the country for paying work. At the same time, key donors have isolated this country, out of frustration with Mr. Mugabe; there is no funding coming in. Any international aid agencies that might have stepped in to help are holding back or leaving as the government threatens to implement a law that would give it direct oversight of their budgets and projects.

Zimbabwe is receiving only $4 (U.S.) in donor support for each person infected by AIDS, compared with a regional average of $74. Neighbouring Zambia, for example, received $187 for every infected person last year; Cameroon, with a third as many infected people as Zimbabwe, received $121, and Mozambique, which has half as many as Zimbabwe, got $92 a person.

Of the key donors, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria approved a $10-million grant to Zimbabwe in 2002. It has not released the money because of concerns about governance, and it rejected a request for a grant of $218-million last year.

The World Bank, which has a major AIDS-treatment plan, is financing no projects here. Nor is the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Yet Zimbabwe has the fourth highest infection rate in the world. The three countries higher on the list (Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland) are tiny nations with populations of fewer than two million people; Zimbabwe's is 11.5 million.

"Donors are looking at our government, not looking at the people," said Prisca Nhakutombwa, a volunteer AIDS counsellor in Harare who has been living with HIV since 1986. "We are suffering for our government."

Ms. Nhakutombwa co-ordinates teams of people to give palliative care in the slums around Harare, and wonders every week where they will get the latex gloves and the cotton swabs to do it. She says it is these people, incontinent in the last weeks of their life and wrapped in newspaper, who pay the price for an international desire to isolate Mr. Mugabe.