Zimbabwe (Mugabe) Decries Salt Mining Company

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - President Robert Mugabe has accused mining giant Anglo-American Corp. of hoarding salt amid Zimbabwe's hunger crisis and threatened to seize the company's local assets, state media reported Sunday.

Mugabe said his government "will not tolerate companies bent on causing unnecessary suffering to the people by creating unnecessary shortages," state radio reported.

The radio said ruling party officials last week found 2,000 metric tons (2,200 tons) of salt in warehouses belonging to National Foods, a company partially owned by Anglo Zimbabwe, a subsidiary of London-based Anglo American.

A National Foods executive said the salt had not been put on the market because it had been imported from neighboring Botswana at the parallel exchange rate of 300 Zimbabwean dollars to the U.S. dollar.

At that rate, nearly six times the government's fixed exchange rate, the company would take a huge loss if it sold the salt at the market price set by the government, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The company had been negotiating with government officials to find a compromise price for the salt.

In a speech to ruling party officials Friday, Mugabe attacked National Foods, which he described as "an Anglo American company of Nicky Oppenheimer," the chairman of the mining giant.

"They have been hoarding salt. ... They want people on the streets against our government. What kind of mischief is this?" he said, according to the state-owned Sunday Mail. "We will take over their enterprises."

Officials from Anglo Zimbabwe, which owns 34 percent of National Foods, could not immediately be reached for comment.

In the 1990s, Anglo Zimbabwe sold off most of its industrial and agricultural investments in Zimbabwe, but retained some mining interests.

More than 6 million Zimbabweans, about half the population, are in danger of starvation after a drought and government seizures of white-owned commercial farms nearly destroyed this year's grain harvest, according to the United Nations.

The country is running out of corn and wheat, and its supplies of cooking oil and salt are dwindling.

Genocide - The starving of Africans*** Of the 13 million Africans facing imminent hunger and possibly starvation, 6 million to 7 million are Zimbabweans. Their country was once the bread basket of Africa, with healthy annual surpluses of maize as well as good supplies of winter-grown wheat. In 2000, however, the government of President Robert Mugabe began attacking the most productive white- and black-owned commercial farms, rapidly destroying their ability to grow food or cash crops. By 2001, for a variety of reasons, Zimbabwe was effectively bankrupt, so Mugabe's men exported a vast strategic grain reserve for cash. When it became clear that the 2002 maize harvest in March would be small (mostly because of farm invasions, not so much because of weak rains), the government store was bare and there was no money to purchase maize from South Africa or Argentina.

To compound the misery of Zimbabweans, the country's minister of agriculture and other associates of Mugabe refused until April to agree that the country would run out of staple food. Opposition politicians had predicted disaster last September. But for purposes of propaganda before the presidential election in March, his government denied the possibility of shortfalls. Even after belatedly acknowledging the country's precarious food situation in April, the government has harassed external relief efforts and has succeeded in denying food relief to areas that voted against Mugabe in March. ***

Who Is To Blame for Africa's Woes?***Everything that is happening in Zimbabwe is being done in full accord with the doctrines of post-colonialism. If every evil is caused by colonialism, then the heart of the problem must be the colonists themselves. In Zimbabwe, that means thousands of white British farmers who settled in Zimbabwe's sparsely populated countryside and built a prosperous agricultural economy. The settler's use of Western agricultural techniques, combined with the benefits of British law and order, made Zimbabwe into the breadbasket of southern Africa, an exporter of grain on which all of its neighbors relied. But in accordance with leftist philosophy, Zimbabwe's post-colonial ruler, Robert Mugabe, denounced the white farmers and hatched a scheme for "land reform."

In the language of tin-pot dictatorships, "reform" means "theft." For years, Mugabe has allowed armed gangs to occupy white-owned farms, sometimes murdering the owners, as a precursor to a plan to seize the farms, allegedly for redistribution to poor blacks. (In reality, the farms are going to Mugabe's cronies.) The result? People are starving in Zimbabwe, not because there is a drought, but because hundreds of thousands of acres of crops have not been planted. Some farms are fallow because they are occupied by armed thugs. Others are unused because of a law threatening white farmers with two years in prison if they plant without government permission, which has not been given. Other farms are unplanted simply because no one in his right mind would go to the trouble of planting crops that will be seized before he can harvest them. When you make war on the farmers, what can you expect but famine?***

IT was our government that was the enabler for this disaster!!!! During the Carter and Clinton administrations, a policy to not oppose communist revolutionary movements was blatently undertaken. During the Carter years, it was more important to solve the pressing problems of killer rabbits and during the Clintoon years, it was more pressing to hire easy interns. Seriously though, Jimmy Carter's decimation, with the assistance of the Demosocialist Congress of the time, of our military-intelligence apparatus enabled all of this to happen. Regan and Bush Sr. elected to contain this problem in our own hemisphere. Then comes the Klintoon legacy. Since communism per se was allegedly defeated, Bubba saw no reason to oppose the expansion of "freedom movements" against allegedly tyranical govenments. And in Africa, as a payback to Jesse Jackson and the radical reverse racists of our country, and to satisfy the Eurosocialists who ran the U.N. all opposition to the black dictators who assumed power in South Africa and Zimbabwe was eliminated. Who cares if a half million die? Hell, it's a half world away and it would interfere with the intern pursuit. Plus we know that Rather would only give it 20 seconds during his newscast. Instead of analyzing the true nature of these "liberated" nations and their communist governments, the focus was placed on the oppressive nature of the racist financial world which prevented these corrupt regimes from getting more powerful. The U.S. let this happen. Now our tax dollars will feed the communists as usual. Instead of drawing a line in the sand, Bush is no better than Klintoon or Carter. We will no longer create embargos like those against Cuba. We will simply cowtow to the left, sell out to the U.N., and continue the worldwide socialization and creation of a U.N. government to manage every nation's affairs in the world; including our own country.

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