Posted on 08/27/2002 5:04:56 AM PDT by Starmaker
David Stevens was the first white farmer to be murdered after Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe declared war against white farmers. Militiamen broke into Stevens´s house and looted it, then beat him. Two friends who saw him driven away in handcuffs followed the vehicle to town, then went to the police station to report the abduction. As police looked on, militiamen dragged the two men away, tied them up, beat them with iron bars and rocks, then dumped them by a river. Stevens was brought to the site, executed with a shot to his face, and his body dumped on his friends, who survived to tell the story.
Since then ten more white farmers have been brutally murdered, including a woman whose son had been murdered the year before. Mugabe´s “war veterans,” police, military, ruling party members, and “militias” have attacked and beaten white farmers and their families and black employees, illegally attacked and occupied white farms, burned homes and crops, raped workers, and looted homes to intimidate white farmers into abandoning their farms—some of which have been in families for generations. Mugabe has taken no legal action to punish wrongdoers or protect the farmers, nor have any local authorities. Whites have no protection against the state-sponsored violence.
Mugabe has now summarily confiscated thousands of whites farms and evicted the white owners. White farmers who remain on their land to fight the unlawful eviction orders in court have been attacked or arrested by Mugabe´s order and face up to two years in prison. Dozens have been detained. One farmer who left his farm was still tracked down by police and ZANU-PF activists and attacked at his apartment in the city.
The farms were to be redistributed to landless peasants. (The government claims whites control 70 percent of fertile land, but other estimates put the total at 20 percent, while the government owns most of the rest.) As Amnesty International reported, however, “Senior Zimbabwean officials, including the two vice-presidents and relatives of President Robert Mugabe, have taken farms under the government's land reforms.”
The Washington Times reported that First Lady Grace Mugabe has selected a spacious white farm that she will personally occupy. So much for real land reform.
Amnesty International has expressed concerns about, “the widespread human rights violations carried out against dozens of commercial farmers and thousands of farm labourers in the context of redistribution of land in Zimbabwe. The pattern of attacks is part of the structural impunity, in that the government sees itself as above the law and resorts to the illegal use of force through the ‘militias,´ which in turn leads to serious violations of human rights.”
The U. S. State Department has denounced the crimes and human rights violations. Six million Zimbabweans face starvation, it says, partly because of disrupted farm production caused by the land seizure and evictions, which it called "reckless and reprehensible." It deplored the “abuse of human rights.”
Amnesty International documented the involvement of the government actions against white farmers. “When the Zimbabwe National Army's Fifth Brigade committed mass human rights violations in the mid-1980s, it appeared that the Zimbabwean government attempted to camouflage political killings of civilians by attributing many killings to ‘dissidents.´ In a similar manner in recent years, the Zimbabwean authorities have attempted to conceal state involvement in creating and coordinating the activities of ‘militias´ that occupied farmland owned by white commercial farmers starting in 2000.”
Year 2000 was when the latest killings, farm occupations, and attacks began.
Zimbabwe is a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Many doubt that the ICC´s supposedly good intentions (remember, that´s what the road to hell is paved with) touted by world-government fanatics will ever materialize. ICC will more likely degenerate into the usual chaos of other UN efforts, or become an international political weapon to punish those who refuse to act globally. An example of international judicial abuse was the case of Augusto Pinochet, who was hounded by a leftist Spanish prosecutor who used international legal maneuvers to keep the aging former Chilean leader under house arrest in Britain until a British judge allowed him to return home.
The test for the UN and ICC will be the case against Mugabe for human rights violations against thousands of white farmers and their families, all citizens of his nation of Zimbabwe.
Mugabe´s crimes are clearly covered by international declarations and documents. ICC Article 6, Genocide, states: “For the purpose of this Statute, ‘genocide´ means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group;
It matters not whether the victims number a dozen or thousands or millions. What counts is the targeting of a race, in this case whites.
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Article 7 states: “‘crime against humanity´ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population . . . (h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds.”
The UN´s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17, states: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
Human Rights Watch reported similar (but bloodier) violations and indictments in East Timor: “The indictments portray the 1999 violence in East Timor as a civil disturbance rather than a systematic and widespread terror campaign, thereby ensuring from the outset that the establishment of cases of crimes against humanity would be much more difficult. The role of the military and Indonesian officials in organizing and arming militia groups and in orchestrating the violence has never been fully revealed in court.” The same legal logic applies in Zimbabwe. Mugabe´s campaign is “a systematic and widespread terror campaign” with his military and officials “orchestrating the violence” against white farmers, a “crime against humanity,” as in East Timor, that cries out for justice.
That Mugabe is a black leader, and his victims are white, shouldn´t prevent the UN and ICC from seeking justice. The two international bodies are supposedly concerned with crimes against human rights and racism in all its forms, so they should follow their own declarations and charters and indict Robert Mugabe for his crimes.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Allan at acstover@comcast.net .
No, they won't. The U.N. is as UNgodly as Mugabe and is probably supporting him. Prepare! Something wicked this way cometh.
It hath ere arrived.
US OUT OF THE UN!
UN OUT OF THE US!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Fat chance.
Well, this opens up an opportunity to send in sniper teams and end the Mugabe regime - above the law and all that. Are you listening, Mr. Blair?
Good one.
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