Key facts about Zimbabwe

LAND: Zimbabwe, landlocked and covering 150,000 square miles (388,500 square kilometers), borders on Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. The area around the capital, Harare, is on a high plateau rising to mountains in the east and sloping down to lowlands in the west and south.

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PEOPLE: About 12 million, based on 2002 census, but an estimated 5 million have since fled as economic fugitives and political exiles. Majority Bantu-speaking people from the Shona and Ndebele tribes. Whites number under 20,000.

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HISTORY: Founded as Rhodesia by British settlers in the late 19th century, it became independent Zimbabwe in 1980 after a seven-year war in which at least 40,000 fighters, most of them black, died. Another 30,000, most of them civilians, were killed in a crackdown on the minority Ndebele people in the five years after independence. Zimbabwe thrived on tobacco and other farm exports until the government-instigated seizures, often violent, of white-owned commercial farms starting in 2000. More than 700,000 mainly opposition supporters were made homeless in a campaign that destroyed shanty homes and market stalls in the cities in 2005. Up to 4,000 people die each week from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses.

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ECONOMY: Annual inflation runs at over 100,000 percent, the world's highest. Unemployment is at 80 percent, the same percentage that lives on less than US$1 a day.