Posted on 10/23/2001 5:57:27 PM PDT by robnoel
Black farm workers are new victims of Mugabe
By Peta Thornycroft in Marondera (Filed: 24/10/2001)
WHILE the world's attention has been diverted by events elsewhere, Robert Mugabe's campaign of political intimidation in Zimbabwe has changed in character. The Mugabe loyalists who enforced his push to evict white farmers from their land have begun to terrorise black farm workers, disenfranchising them and forcing them from their homes by threat of violence.
Panaka Muzama and his wife, Edna, have packed their possessions ready to leave the only home they have ever known. They are the latest victims of President Robert Mugabe's land grab in Zimbabwe. Mr Muzama, 29, works for a commercial farmer, Henry Harris, 36, on a mixed farm near Marondera, 55 miles south-east of Harare.
Four months ago Mr Mugabe's loyalists invaded the land and halted farming. Now they have ordered Mr Muzama and the other workers to leave. Mr Harris's 200 workers and their families will be replaced by 91 Mr Mugabe supporters and their families. As well as clearing the land for the invaders, this will make it near impossible for the Muzamas to vote in the forthcoming presidential election. Mr Muzama said: "I want to stay here on the farm. I have nowhere to go. Our future is not bright."
All workers in the farm village have been packing their goods fearing violence if they missed the deadline this week set by the Mugabe supporters. Three days earlier their friends on a neighbouring farm were attacked with axes, whips, clubs and chains, and 16 men and six women were injured, one of them critically. The Muzama family will join 75,000 people evicted in the past three months, often violently, from commercial farms. They lose their jobs, homes, schools and health care. When Mr Mugabe launched his land invasions last February, the farm workers' welfare was not on his agenda, and they have become internal refugees, said Kerry Kay, welfare officer for the Commercial Farmers' Union. "Many of them have disappeared." Mr Muzama and his wife face losing their Zimbabwean citizenship because their parents were born in Malawi. He said: "I don't know where they are and I have never been to Malawi."
Mr Muzama, like hundreds of thousands of others, has until Jan 6 to renounce his right to a foreign passport or lose his Zimbabwe citizenship. Observers said Mr Mugabe's regime passed the legislation to deprive whites eligible for British passports of citizenship, without considering the effects on immigrant workers and their families.
The Muzamas, like others displaced in the past 18 months, are unlikely to be resident in the constituencies in which they are registered to vote for the presidential election early next year. More than two million people live on the commercial farms, and human rights activists have given warning that vast numbers have been disenfranchised as a result of farm invasions and political violence.
A mile away, Memory Dairo, 35, has moved into a new hut with a plot on the Harris farm given in thanks for her husband's support for Mr Mugabe in the war of independence. She said: "We came here because we were starving. I know it is wrong to use this white man's fields and his fertiliser, but what can we do?" * Hundreds of Zimbabweans sought refuge at a Johannesburg police station after their shacks were burnt in a protest against immigrants, police said yesterday.
South African residents of the Zandspruit settlement at Honeydew, west of the city, had accused the foreigners of crime and taking jobs.
But no one's interested and he knows it. He has a free pass. The UN (and certainly the US!) will avoid African entanglements and not commit substantial resources. No one stepped up to confront the situation in Rwanda a few years back where an estimated 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered in genocide attacks by the Hutus.
Because this Muggy is the next Osama (Usama, Ousama)
He is nothing but a provincial criminal.
If you're white, you should care because they are your kinfolk.
Forgive me for being blunt, but what was needed was either a revolt by the farmers to kill these bastards or abandoning the farms thus letting the bastards starve.
When whites dared control Rhodesia and South Africa, the international elites ostracized and boycotted them for the "evil" apartheid system. Now that blacks are in control, however, these same elites turn a blind eye to the genocide of the whites. What does this tell you about the ulimate "game plan" of the international elites?
Do you think the whites would ever be allowed to take their lands back given who currently controls the US? If there was even the slimmest chance of the whites regaining control, the US would smash them with more economic and political sanctions. The way things are going, by the year 2050, there will be no majority white nations left on the planet earth.
And you're proud of that?
At some point, it becomes extremely important to recognize there are limits to what the United States can and should do.
Who's talking about the United States? We're talking about race.
You are completely clueless, aren't you. It shows the opposite. Jesse Jackson and all the other "race baiters" destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa because they recognized their solidarity with blacks in Africa. They won because they saw the big picture. At the rate things are going, white race will be extinct in 500 years.
You may be right. I was giving Iceland the benefit of the doubt. ;-)
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