Zimbabwe -- War veterans starve on their looted land

The looming tragedy of Zimbabwe is written on the hungry face of Lydia Muzenda, 62, a black settler on white-owned farmland just south of Harare.

She lives in a mud shack surrounded by sickly, straggling heads of maize and the stumps of trees cut down for use in building, heating and cooking. The shade cover has gone. The scrubby grass has given way to baked mud that the rains quickly turn into a quagmire. As the topsoil washes away, the farm becomes ever less fertile. Skinny goats pick at whatever grass roots are left.

Muzenda and her friend Nelson Takawira, 42, are willing to work. But in common with other settlers who had been loyal supporters of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF party, they feel betrayed.

Thousands of Zimbabwe's war veterans and settlers are on the brink of starvation caused by Mugabe's disastrous land-seizure programme.

This has reached its most critical stage after the passing of Friday's deadline for most white farmers to leave their land so it can be redistributed to landless blacks.

For the war vets who are intended to benefit, the expiry of the deadline should have been a cause for celebration. Instead many were in despair, unable to feed themselves on the farms they occupied and bitter that cabinet ministers, high-ranking civil servants, MPs, army officers and other members of Mugabe's elite had grabbed much of the best land for themselves.

When the veterans first invaded the white farms in early 2000 they were intended to be the vanguard of "resettlement schemes" extolled on television as miracles of peasant productivity.

But while the black elite has grabbed many farms, owning far more than the 400 hectares (about 990 acres) decreed by the reform programme, the countryside has been denuded.

The settlers were promised seeds, fertilisers and tractors. The promises were broken, with the result that hundreds of thousands are now destitute and the land is derelict.

"We are starving, there's nothing to eat at all," Muzenda said. She sold five cattle to transport herself and her possessions to a farm at Mhondoro. Now she lacks cattle to plough with. "If we don't get the use of a tractor soon I fear the worst."

She has made fruitless trips to the nearest town, Chegutu, to ask for maize from the local Grain Marketing Board.

Takawira also sees starvation ahead: "The rainy season is only a few months away but we still have to prepare our fields for planting. We haven't the means to plough and we haven't even got seed."

Some 1,740 white farmers were reported yesterday to have risked imprisonment by defying the deadline and refusing to relinquish land they have made productive and profitable. They believe the government eviction orders could still be overturned in the courts.

"In the middle of a raging famine where the government is appealing for donor aid it would just be a bit embarrassing to be arresting farmers for trying to go on growing food," said Jenni Williams of Justice in Agriculture, which is using the courts to fight the evictions.

"I guess the point is that we are fundamentally law-abiding folk," said Ben Freething, who farms in Mashonaland. "Most farmers just cannot get their heads around the idea that they might be arrested for living in their homes and trying to carry on producing sorely needed food on land they either bought or which has been in their family for generations."

Another 1,160 white farmers did move, leaving areas of once-rich farmland abandoned. Many headed for Harare. The leafy, tree-lined streets of the capital were clogged with pickup trucks and lorries transporting household goods and there was hardly a house left for rent or sale. Some went abroad. Others tried to maintain a semblance of normality by fishing on Lake Kariba. Mugabe is due to give a speech tomorrow to mark Heroes Day, which commemorates those who fought in the independence war of the 1970s against white rule in the former Rhodesia. Last year's commemoration saw violent looting of farms around the northern town of Chinhoyi and some farmers fear a repeat.

The tension increased yesterday afternoon when troops moved out of barracks in Harare and other urban centres. While it seemed possible that they were preparing for the traditional Heroes' Day march-pasts, observers said the movements looked bigger than usual. Some suggested that Mugabe was about to use the military as well as the police to force farmers off their land.

The only violent incident to be reported since the deadline passed was the assault of Kevin Smith, a farmer, by war veterans at Karoi.

However, Ignatius Chombo, the powerful local government minister, revealed the regime's fury at the refusal of so many farmers to comply with eviction orders. "All the excuses by the farmers show what an arrogant and racist bunch they are," he said, adding that "appropriate measures" would be taken against those breaking the law.

Members of the white community were anxiously awaiting Mugabe's speech for a sign as to whether they have any future in Zimbabwe. Mugabe has not wavered from his ideological determination to destroy the white farmers and their workers. They supported the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which came close to defeating him in flawed parliamentary and presidential elections.

For black Zimbabweans hunger - not politics or race - is the overwhelming issue. Zimbabwe was a land of plenty but now faces starvation caused by a combination of drought and the government's gross mismanagement of the land issue.

The settlers dumped by the Mugabe government onto poorly irrigated cattle land or game farms are among the worst-off. Having slaughtered much of the wildlife and cut down the trees for firewood, many have found the land incapable of supporting their families and have drifted away. "I try not to be a bitter man but now all my animals are dead or gone and so are the war vets and the settlers," said one white game farmer. The shock troops who blazed this trail of devastation were the war veterans. But last week they were in disarray after the imprisonment for embezzlement of Andrew Ndlovu, their leader. It takes a brave man to predict what comes next.

"The damage is done. What has happened is irreversible," said Colin Cloete, president of the Commercial Farmers' Union. He is appalled at the cynical use of a reform programme ostensibly intended to redress colonial wrongs as a means of benefiting Mugabe's cronies.

"Some people call them cellphone farmers," he said. "They don't really farm. They have jobs in town and treat the farms they take over as weekend retreats. We're going to end up with a tremendous amount of derelict land." A high percentage of white farmers would still come back if the government relented.

As they readily acknowledge, however, they make up less than 1% of the population and are not by any means suffering the worst. Millions of Zimbabwe's 13m people who supported the MDC opposition have been thrown onto the scrapheap, too. Many are black farm workers who are being made homeless as the whites leave their land.

"We would be better off with only 6m people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle," said Didymus Mutasa, a Mugabe confidant and Zanu PF organisation secretary. "We don't want all these extra people (farm workers)."

Behind this thought is not just the idea that many farm workers in Zimbabwe have one Malawian or Zambian parent but also that those who do not support the Mugabe regime have put themselves "outside the nation". Such ideas have a chilling relevance now that famine threatens and the government is ensuring that food aid goes only to the party faithful.

Vincent Hungwe, one of the regime's rising young stars - formerly permanent secretary of agriculture and now of local government - said: "We may have to take this whole system back to zero before we can start it up again and make it work in a new way." Many black and white Zimbabweans who have been chased from their homes and their old lives already have a taste of what he means by zero.

"We don't want all these extra people"

If I lived in Zim, I would not want them either. I Live in America and don't want them. These thieving, murderous, slothful savages must be purged by the international community or by the righteous from within their own ranks. The latter will never happen as there are obvious no righteous amongst them.

The media, African and Western, keeps talking about how few farmers occupy such a high percentage of "the best land in Zimbabwe"

But this is veldt.

It can only be described as "the best land" because technological farming and irrigation has made it such.

Take away the technology and the land reverts to veldt, or where there is no cover, to a dust bowl.

When the English settlers arrived they took the red soil veldt land which the indigenous farmers did not want and did not have the technology to farm, leaving the indigenous peoples to continue to farm the rich black alluvial soil land that they did know how to farm.

The English (and a few Afrikaaners) put a lot of technology and sweat equity into making the veldt land profitable. It looks like it will take only the current winter season and the coming summer season to return their work to "zero".

>"I guess the point is that we are fundamentally law-abiding folk," said Ben Freething, who farms in Mashonaland. "Most farmers just cannot get their heads around the idea that they might be arrested for living in their homes and trying to carry on producing sorely needed food on land they either bought or which has been in their family for generations."

They should get their head around that idea really quick. This has the potential of becoming a bloodbath. When the U.N. armed the worst of the indigenous in Fiji, the honest ethnic Indians who had been disarmed earlier ended up sharpening kitchen knives in hopes of defending themselves against armed Fijians.

>"We would be better off with only 6m people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle," said Didymus Mutasa, a Mugabe confidant and Zanu PF organisation secretary. "We don't want all these extra people (farm workers)."

Looks like more of the U.N.godly population control agenda. Stir them up, encourage them to kill each other and rip off the land from the landowners. This is the same agenda the globalists are trying all around the world.

Dan 7:7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.

"We don't want all these extra people"

He is referring to the farm workers, not the so-called "veterans".

He has sent the signal that those "outside the country", i.e., those not allied with Mugabe are going to be slaughtered.

The other shoe is getting ready to drop.

Regards,

The English (and a few Afrikaaners) put a lot of technology and sweat equity into making the veldt land profitable.

Have you ever visited the Imperial Valley in far Southern California? The landscape originally resembled something like the backside of the moon. Through very hard work and a lot of technology including massive irrigation, it is now a very productive agricultural region. It requires constant upkeep. If you threw the farmers off and put in city-dwellers with no agricultural background, it would go to hell in a hand-basket very quickly. And it looks like that's what Pol Pot Mugabe wants for Zimbabwe.

"When the English settlers arrived they took the red soil veldt land which the indigenous farmers did not want and did not have the technology to farm, leaving the indigenous peoples to continue to farm the rich black alluvial soil land that they did know how to farm."

True. Most people don't know this. The white farms requires technology that the Africans do not know how to use.

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