"I'm not sure where the minister has been these last two years, because he has already listed 95 percent of Zimbabwe's farms for government takeover," Buckle explained. "There are now only 308 farms in the entire country not listed for state seizure. Neither Dr. Made nor any of his officials are prepared to offer any written guarantees to a farmer that he will be able to grow, reap and sell his wheat before the government moves in and takes the farm over. The 6 million starving Zimbabweans have Dr. Made and his government to thank for their plight. We have become like Somalia and Ethiopia and are holding out our begging bowls to the world. A world that would rather feed us than help us to get a democratic government who care for their people."
So who has taken control of Zimbabwe's formerly white-owned farms, one might wonder. "Last week, the government in Zimbabwe announced that settlers and squatters were being evicted from commercial farms in our nation. All week we have been waiting with bated breath to hear from the Commercial Farmers Union that this is in fact the case and that commercial farmers have begun picking up their lives and getting some food into the ground. From all reports, though, it appears that this is not what is happening. Squatters and settlers are being moved off some farms - those that have been given to Zimbabwe's VIPs," Buckle said.
"Lists of the new owners of Zimbabwe's prime and previously most productive commercial farms have now been made public. The list runs at the moment to 187 names, and it is shocking. … The new owners of Zimbabwe's commercial farms are not farmers at all. They are not graduates from our agricultural schools and colleges. They are not young men and women who are ready to toil under the baking African sun tending crops and livestock." Buckle said that the new owners of Zimbabwe's farms include government ministers, members of Parliament, police officials, military brass and judicial officers. Members of the media friendly to Mugabe have also collected prime property.........
Many South Africans fear that Zimbabwe-style farm invasions are just around the corner. Since 1994, over 1,200 white South African farmers out of a total of 40,000 have been murdered, with another 6,000 attacks reported….***
Zimbabwe-Mugabe Says Sanctions Won't Stop Land Seizures - Blair "wasting his time over sanctions" ***The Herald also quoted Mugabe as telling his officials at a party to mark the official opening of parliament on Tuesday that he would never yield ground on the issue of land. It quoted the 78-year-old, who has regularly attacked British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the past two years, as saying that "Blair, that young man" was wasting his time with sanctions against his government over its land policies. "The land belongs to us, we fought for it, we died for it and we shall continue to fight and die for it," he said. "But somehow this young fellow thinks no, if he piles sanctions on we will surrender. Nobody has taught him that we don't know the word surrender in relation to our rights. That word we can't spell, it's not in our dictionary," Mugabe said. ***
Aligned with Castro and Gaddafi - Mugabe Vows to Defend Zimbabwe from Western 'Bullies' *** HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - President Robert Mugabe vowed on Tuesday to defend his government against Western "bullies" and said Zimbabwe's economic recovery hinged on land redistribution. In a 40-minute speech to open the new parliamentary session, Mugabe made no direct mention of tighter EU sanctions, his media crackdown or any plans for his ZANU-PF party to resume talks with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Strongly defending his government's right to take possession of white farmers' land, he ignored a boycott of his speech by MDC legislators, who make up just over a third of the assembly.
Outside the southern African state's parliament, there was no sign of a planned protest march by pro-democracy activists after police warnings that the demonstration would be crushed. Mugabe said Zimbabwe, in the grips of its worst economic and political crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, was facing "considerable challenges" from what he called "British machinations" and a regional drought.
The economy is in its fourth year of recession with record high inflation and unemployment and a severe food shortage. "Our sovereignty is constantly under attack from the bullying states ... which seek to use their political and economic prowess to achieve global hegemony," Mugabe said. At 78, Mugabe is a left-winger who counts Cuba's Fidel Castro and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi among his foreign allies. Monday, the European Union extended a blacklist of Zimbabwean officials subjected to a visa ban and asset freeze. The move is aimed at piling more pressure on the country whose human rights record it says has deteriorated since Mugabe's re-election in March. ***
Evil under the sun***It is not often that you see a human face devoid of hope. Last Wednesday morning in a dusty wood outside Harare in Zimbabwe I looked into many such faces. These were the forgotten victims of Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, just a few of the 85,000 'displaced' black workers thrown violently off their farms. Their few possessions have been taken from them, and most will never find work again.
Among them are frail and elderly men and women, retired after a lifetime's work, and children whose worlds have been turned upside-down, hanging around in the sun with no prospect of an education. I saw about 100 such people. A 45- year-old foreman had been forced to leave behind the beef herd he had worked with for 15 years. He was a skilled stockman of the sort highly valued in any agricultural economy. He is unlikely ever to tend cattle again. A 54-year- old farmhand, whose father and grandfather had worked on the farm before him, had lost the only home and working environment he had ever known - and Zimbabwe had lost another skilled hand. An 80-year-old wizened and lame retired worker, expecting to live out his declining years in relative tranquillity, was stumbling around the tents and the open fires, lost. A mother pointed to her ten-year-old child and said, "No school now. No more school ever."
From what I heard she is probably right. The numbers are rocketing. If the land grabs continue and the 2,900 white farmers are required to leave their farms on 9 August, the number of 'displaced' black farm workers could rise to 300,000. Robert Mugabe couldn't care less. His government sneeringly describes the victims as Malawian or Mozambican, ignoring the reality that they have been in Zimbabwe for generations. My colleague Richard Spring, MP, and I arrived at an almost empty Harare airport at about 9 a.m. Because the Zimbabwean authorities did not know we were there, we were able to see troubling sights. A whistle-stop tour of the farmlands north-west of Harare showed us that hectare after hectare of highly productive farmland is lying unprepared, unplanted and vandalised. The sheer evil of this deliberate waste, at a time when six million Zimbabweans are malnourished and the threat of famine is just around the corner, was made starker by the evident success of the few farms still in production.***