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Posted on 08/10/2002 7:26:21 AM PDT by Clive
Dear Family and Friends,
We are all sitting anxiously waiting to see what is going to happen to the 2900 commercial farmers who have been ordered to stop growing food and get off their properties.
All week a variety of government ministers and spokesmen have said there will be no reprieve and that farmers who remain in their homes will have to face the force of Zimbabwean law.
Some Ministers have been unable to resist getting in as many racist insults as they can - statements that would cause outrage anywhere else in the world.
Everyone is extremely tense and a lot of farmers have taken what they can and have left their homes, some permanently and others just for a few days during this long holiday weekend. Others who have nowhere to go have stayed in their homes and everyone is expecting the worst and hoping for the best.
All week there have been heartbreaking stories of families leaving their properties of 50 or more years, leaving graves of their parents, thriving businesses and a lifetime of hard work and memories.
At this time almost nothing is known about what will happen to an estimated 300,000 farm workers who live and work on these properties. Certainly they, like their employers, know nothing else aside from farming and they face a very bleak future indeed.
It is thought that many of these workers and their families will drift into towns and cities and look for work there but unemployment levels are above 60% now, so their chances are not good. With perhaps two thirds of Zimbabwe's towns being farming based, none of us know how long these centres will continue to exist.
This weekend the country celebrates Heroes Day and commemorates those war veterans who died for Zimbabwe's Independence. Many of us though are also remembering the more recently deceased Heroes who lost their lives in the struggle for democracy that has been going on for the past 29 months.
People like farmer David Stevens who was abducted and shot in Murehwa and Tichaona Chiminya, Morgan Tsvangirai's driver, killed in a petrol bomb in 2000. Ordinary men who dared to differ in their political beliefs like Martin Olds smoked out of his Bulawayo farm house and then shot and Peter Kareza, dragged out of his Shamva home and literally beaten to death.
There have been over 160 people killed at the hands of war veterans and government supporters since March 2000 and there is a feeling of great sadness in the country, both for those that have died and for all who will die of hunger in the months ahead. It is still totally unbelievable that a government would willingly and purposely prevent people from growing food.
Zimbabwe, always a regional exporter of food, is now unable to help herself, let alone her neighbours like Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia.
We have all been reduced to starving beggars and the world has sat back and watched this happen. No one has dared intervene for fear they may be called racists, even the South Africans who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of starving Zimbabwean refugees have remained silent.
Their President Thabo Mbeki apparently also chooses to believe that the crisis in Zimbabwe is about land reform.
I wonder if President Mbeki or any other African leader has looked at the names of all the people murdered here in the last two years - there are only 12 white names on that list of 160 people.
Just as the farm invasions and murders have not been about land or race, neither is the starvation and devastation. Zimbabwe's crisis is purely a political one.
. . .a terrorism that continues to go unchallenged by the rest of the free world; and that is unbelievable.
Bump!
This is more about racism than revenge, I think.
You had me until this. Compromised? These people willingly engaged in these activites, for their own profit. The word compromised infers that they were tricked through hardship into it. They did it willingly, and they are destroying it willingly.
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Yes , it is really that simple. The Israelis took a wasteland and created a garden, now, in Zimbabwee a garden is being made into a wasteland. Really quite simple.
Of course it is the money and the 'name of the game' is simple. . .and it is still unbelieveable.
And you are hyperventilating.
Look, I've not recommended any course of action for the US. Zimbabwe belongs to the Commonwealth, and it's in their sphere of influence. I would look primarily to them to exert influence, which they have failed to do so far.
I wasn't even directly disagreeing with you in my post. Sheesh.
has to be one of the three since you claim the problems can be laid at the door of evil USA expansionist policies.
Mugabe is on the correct path?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/731058/posts?page=57#57
We are seeing a new kind of colonialism is all. One that is not as kind as we saw before WWII.
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