Posted on 08/14/2002 7:33:44 PM PDT by Clive
Within 48 hours of President Robert Mugabe telling the world that white farmers who owned a single farm could stay, the Hinde family were forcibly evicted from their only piece of land yesterday.
Terry Hinde, and his British-born wife Sue, woke up to a screaming mob of Mr Mugabe's supporters surrounding their house, hurling insults and threatening them with violence for staying on beyond the Aug 8 deadline for 2,900 white farmers to abandon their homesteads.
"We knew we had come to the end of the road, so we called the removal company, and decided to leave," said Mr Hinde, 59, his eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion.
Before Mr Mugabe's land seizure campaign, he was a major producer of wheat, tobacco and soya at his 2,200-acre farm at Condwelani, north of Harare.
But yesterday morning he became the target for a mob of Mr Mugabe's militant backers. After surrounding the family home, they began to smash windows. Their fury only intensified when Precious Shumba, a reporter from the independent Daily News - a persistent critic of the regime - arrived.
After handing them his business card he slipped into the house shaking. On realising who he was, Mr Mugabe's supporters started screaming and banging windows, demanding the "journalists" come out to to explain his lies.
"The Daily News demonises President Mugabe, they tell lies, every day. They are enemies," screamed a youth wielding a home-made axe, its blade glinting in the midday sun.
For more than a hour they laid siege to the house. The Hindes telephoned the police at Bindura, about 60 miles north of Harare, asking for help. The police said they didn't have a vehicle to send.
All the while the crowd outside, some smelling of stale liquor, surrounded the house in the family's luscious garden, ablaze with southern spring flowers.
Then an older man burst through the front door asking Mr Hinde or his son Chris to go to the wheatfields to fix the irrigation equipment. "We had a written agreement with the settlers on our farm.
"We would grow 50 acres of wheat for them, and we would grow 200 for ourselves. We were determined to find a way to survive this," said Mr Hinde.
The Hindes have had squatters on their farm since April 2000 and have been threatened and prevented from growing all but a minority of crops. Scores of their cattle have been slaughtered, and yet they soldiered on - until yesterday.
The mob began pushing through the front door, and Mr Hinde told them to move back. They were looking for Precious. "This is my last stand, they cannot come in here." Mr Hinde said.
A neighbour offered to go to collect the police. The mob shouted that they were the police, that we were British, that blacks in Britain didn't own land, and insisted that there were two million whites in Zimbabwe - rather than the 30,000 that are left. "Give us beer, give us cigarettes," they roared. The removal company then arrived.
By this time Precious had shed his navy jacket and tie and put on a T-shirt and khaki hat to disguise himself. When they tried to storm the sitting room, we hid him under a bed.
Eventually the Daily News driver, Trust Mpofu, who had been attacked while waiting outside the security fence, saw two older men, both of them genuine veterans of Zimbabwe's independence war.
They told him there were "no orders for any violence today", and escorted Precious out of the house and into my car. We sped down the dusty driveway, five hours after we arrived, leaving the Hindes behind.
They, too, later made it safely to Harare. In a spiteful act of vandalism, the mob had rubbed sugar granules over my car.
The deadline for all Mugabe's supporters to be on white-owned land they have been allocated is the end of the month.
Thousands have not turned up to claim their plots, according to the cabinet minister Ignatius Chombo, who heads the so- called "task force" in charge of appropriating white-owned land for people like himself.
Many farmers said yesterday that they expected the Hindes' eviction to be repeated many times in the next two weeks until every white was expelled.
There's that media wimp-out word again: "militant".
Terrorist.
Mugabe runs mobs of terrorists in his racist vendetta, his ethnic cleansing.
Send Mr. Mugabe a message:
Write, "Have you at last no shame?" on a .50 cal. sniper round, and have a tete a tete with the man.
He's got to listen to that kind of reason.
Zimbabwe's peace process must begin with Mugabe's head in a jar.
We're not responding in any other way to propaganda footage of the starving.
Root causes:
1) Mugabe is still exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen;
2) See number one above.
LOL!!!
Like the last stockholder in a slide-rule manufacturing company, circa 1972.
Every other civilized human is long gone. Only the savages remain.
In about a month they are going to be wishing they'd rubbed the sugar on their tongues not on the car. I have absolutely no pity for these people...let them starve. If they are, and obviously they are, to stupid to see their own starvation and to stupid not to believe a lieing dictator....let them starve...they've earned a miserable death. Maybe when their kids are running around with bloated stomaches they'll get a clue....but by then, population control will be fully in effect.
More truth than poetry in that one!
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