Posted on 03/18/2002 3:43:09 PM PST by Clive
Harare - The shooting death of a white farmer overnight has spread fear through Zimbabwe's small white community, many members having already begun thinking about fleeing into exile following violence-wracked elections here.
"It's the end for us," said a neighbour of Terry Ford, who was found dead in the early hours of Monday at his farm in Norton, some 40km west of Harare.
"The white farming community is very frightened. People I spoke to feel we are going to be exterminated if we don't leave," he added.
Ford was the eighth white farmer killed in the country since early 2000, when ruling party supporters began invading white-owned farms under President Robert Mugabe's controversial land reforms.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which is generally backed by the white farming community, has recorded more than 100 deaths among its supporters since 2000.
The Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) said Ford's farm was looted by supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF).
He called for help but the police did not respond, and when neighbours showed up it was too late.
"Terry called me around midnight," said the neighbour, who is alone on his farm after having evacuated his family.
"He was very upset, he told me to go and get the police as soon as I could because his life was at stake."
He added: "He told me, 'Don't come alone, they'll kill you,' and then the line went dead. I couldn't sleep, I knew deep down that the worst had happened to him."
Another white farmer, in Mazowe to the north of the capital, would give his name only as David.
He said: "Since Mugabe was re-elected, the invaders know they have a free hand.
"They gave me three hours to leave on Saturday. I'm still here, but I think my death will come soon and through violence."
In Seke, south of Harare, a white farmer named John said he was considering joining his wife and children in Britain, where they
fled after their farm was occupied by black settlers last year.
"It's not our homeland, we don't belong there, but the only choice we have is between exile or death," he said.
Mugabe, who led the nation to independence in 1980 following a bloody guerrilla war, was widely praised for the conciliatory attitude he adopted towards whites who wanted to stay on in the former Rhodesia, renamed Zimbabwe.
By 2000, race relations had remained surprisingly good considering that two decades after independence whites, making up less than one percent of the population, still hogged 70 percent of the prime farmland in the country, despite early efforts to correct the inequities.
But in February 2000, Mugabe was stung by the failure of a constitutional referendum that would have allowed him to seek two more terms, as well as measures enabling the seizure of white farmland without paying compensation to the owners.
With parliamentary elections looming in June, Mugabe played the race card, promising to take back the land from the whites and actively encouraging his supporters to invade their farms.
Only days after the referendum, pro-Mugabe militants began forcibly invading white-owned farms, saying they were protesting the slow pace of redistributing land to the majority black population.
Though many of the invaders were too young to have fought in the 1970s guerrilla war, they were referred to as war veterans, and their colourful leader Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, who has since died, added his revolutionary rhetoric to the cause.
Only some 40 000 whites remain in the country out of a total population of some 12 million. Among them, some white farmers still have a reputation of being bigoted.
Many poor landless blacks, on the other hand, view Mugabe's re-election and his vow to carry on with the land reforms as a long-overdue victory, since whites began chasing blacks off their land more than a century ago.
"Now it's the whites' turn to lose everything and leave," a beaming black peasant said last Friday. - Sapa-AFP
Of course the newspapers are Marxist. They are government controled, the ANC is Marxist, and the ANC is the power in South Africa . Why does this surprise you ?
Such glibness is not only irrelivant, it makes the erson claiming it, look much more than simply foolish.
Such glibness is not only irrelivant, it makes the person claiming it, look much more than simply foolish.
FBI Director Mueller was quoted as saying out here [In Asia] the other day that "OSAMA bin Laden's al-Qaida network lost its sanctuary in Afghanistan and may turn to Southeast Asia or the Middle East."
If the FBI's head is that far up his/its arse as to where the metastatic al-qaida's next metastasis might occur, then we Civilized Peoples are in very deep shit!
Even a somewhat clapped-out semi-retired aeroplane driver in Chiang Mai Thailand has figgered that it is the libyan-arab-terrorist link that has fueled all of Mugabe's most insanely-despotic actions!
And which, terrifyingly, seems to have applied blinkers, ear-muffs and gags to the commonwealth's scumbag "leaders" insofar as that loathesome gaggle's ability to conFRont the Mugabe-Khaddaffi Axis is concerned.
Are turd-way tony blair, Ayahteeyahrower's KKKlarke and Canada's Cretin so concerned at the potential loss of Khaddaffi's oil as to be willing accomplices in that evil bastard's take-over of Rhodesia?
Or just stupid?
The over zealous, uneducated postings, by some, don't help, and make what our enemies say about FR, a truism.
Also, have friends from Lyberia that did the same thing. Got out. Period.
But, please Jorge, do not be too-much distracted by what is happening to Rhodesia and to greater Africa.
In case it distracts you from the fact that the feral-gummint agency on the FRont line of Our Beloved FRaternal Republic's Defense last week issued United States' "non-immigrant student" visas to two sub-humans who have already murdered more than 2,500 of US.
And that the same agency is issuing "refugee" and other visas to hundreds of thousands of similar America-and-Western-Civilization-hating sub-human morons -- and that thousands of them arrive every day.
Our Mugabe is already here and it is called the immigration and naturalization "sevice!"
Whilst America was founded on mostly Judeo-Christian ethics and " civilization " , there was also a lot of ancient Greek and Roman LAW as well. Let's not pussyfoot around the word CAUCAZOID , i. e. white . Neither should the word MARXISM ,be left out of your truncated list. Simple lawlessness is NOT why this is going to soon happen here , and it isn't !
Factual crime statistics, from 150 to 100 years ago, in N.Y.C. ( and I mean Manhattan ! ) were terrible back then. Most of the criminals were white, and a vast proportion of those, were Irish . Are we to now ignore all of that, just because they weren't mostly black or Hispanics ? Oh, and lest we forget, the Chinese Tong Wars were horriffic and about on par with today's driveby shootings AND they were also into " white slavery " , i.e. prostitution, besides the dope and gambling, and just plain od theft and murder stuff. All that, and dope was legal and the Mafia hadn't dug in yet. Then, there was Tammany Hall ( Irish Dems ) and all of that corruption , which makes the Clintons and the 2000 election scandals, look like kindergarten pursuits.
And they and their crime -- and that of all of the others covered in your your rant -- were taken to task by the machinery of America's Civilized, Judeo-Christian-Based Rule of Law and, as they FRom time to time pop up, still are.
But wherever that machinery has been and/or will be placed into the hands of those who, whether in Rhodesia, Somalia, Suid Afrika or in Detroit, are intellectually and/or Morally ill-equipped for the responsibility -- and who are otherwise-motivated -- the destruction of all of Western ["Human," that is] Civilization's Gains inevitably occurs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.