Posted on 09/05/2002 3:43:46 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Zimbabwe's president has vowed to crack down on white farmers who oppose his plan to redistribute land to blacks and are defying orders to abandon their farms, state media reported Thursday.
President Robert Mugabe said half the 2,900 white farmers served with eviction notices disobeyed a recent deadline under a government program to seize land from whites.
"Time is not on their side," Mugabe was quoted by state radio as saying. The increasingly authoritarian leader said his government would take action against those who defied orders.
Despite a potential famine in southern Africa, Mugabe has continued with the seizures of 95 percent of the white-owned farmland in the country, bringing to a standstill an industry that once helped feed southern Africa.
About 6 million Zimbabweans are threatened with starvation.
Mugabe also lashed out at two prominent white lawmakers from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"Your place is in prison and nowhere else. Otherwise your home is outside the country," Mugabe said of the two politicians upon his return to Zimbabwe from neighboring South Africa where he attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Mugabe was greeted at the Harare airport Wednesday by thousands of supporters who were bussed in.
The state Herald newspaper said Mugabe told the crowd that the government also was planning to seize stakes in foreign-owned companies and mines that he said were "scooping out our wealth."
"They can't continue like that, using our wealth," Mugabe was quoted as saying.
About 300 white farmers have been arrested since an Aug. 8 eviction deadline, police said earlier this week. Most were freed on bail but have been forbidden to return to their farms before trial.
Scores of others fled their farms fearing arrest.
The government began targeting minority white farmers, who owned most of the country's commercial farms, in March 2000. The program added to political unrest in the country and critics say many prime farms have gone to politicians, military and police officers and Mugabe supporters instead of the poor.
Mugabe then returned to his presidential palace in an air-conditioned limousine while the crowd shuffled off to their sweltering hovels in Shantytown.
Gosh. Even the Associated Press (AP) is now running for cover from the sham that the Peoples' Paradise of Zimbabwe! is being exposed as. Things must be really, really bad if the ever-dishonest liberal press are turning on one of their own.
(But thanks to FreeRepublic, we already knew how bad things were.)
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