Zimbabwe in crisis

"They don't help the country and they are not productive. They just sit around doing nothing"

Zimbabwe is now in crisis with millions starving as a result of Robert Mugabe's land grab policy. Almost two hundred white farmers have been arrested for defying Mugabe's instruction to stop farming. And where farmers have fled or been forced out war veterans and Zanu PF supporters have let fertile fields and crops rot, planting nothing and creating a wasteland. Foreign and local journalists continue to be harassed and even jailed for reporting what's going on and the BBC is banned from the country. However our reporter Sue Lloyd Roberts entered the country posing as a tourist and armed with a small video camera.

Sue Lloyd-Roberts: Zimbabwe can boast some of the most magnificent sights in Africa, but there are few tourists here today to admire them. News of machete-wielding war veterans attacking whites is having its effect, and the wildlife go about their business unnoticed. Because the BBC is banned from the country, I entered as a tourist, in itself a challenge given that the tourist is about as rare today as the white rhino. I set off to hunt for the white farmer, who was also becoming an endangered species in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. I started in Mashonaland near Harare, the area traditionally most loyal to the president and which has seen the biggest exodus of farmers. This after-church gathering was once attended by some 100 farming families. Today only four are left to exchange the latest tales of police harassment, like being arrested for using a video camera on his own farm.

Bill Pace: He did confiscate the tape. I was grilled for three hours with a CIO bloke breathing down my neck, who wanted to confiscate my British passport. They have told me that if there is anything untoward or if they think there is anything nasty in there, I will be arrested for sedition and conspiracy. I asked one of the farmers to show me an occupied farm.

Lloyd-Roberts: I accompanied one farmer back to her farm where she's packing up.

Kathy Kirkman: I feel so sorry for most of the settlers here because they seem to be so conned and they have been told such a different story as to what is actually happening.

Lloyd-Roberts: Kathy took me to her farm, where the settlers - they have been told they mustn't use the word "squatter" - moved in two years ago. She says they don't stand a chance of making a going concern of it. They have cut down trees, killed the cattle, planted nothing, and as one of them approaches us with a knife in his right hand, don't make friendly neighbours.

Kirkman: We used to grow maize and wheat. Please put the camera down quickly.

Lloyd-Roberts: I hid the camera as the people who now want to take Kathy's house came up to talk to her.

Kirkman: They told me if I was still in our house by Friday, I would be made a martyr. I said what did that mean and they laughed.

Lloyd-Roberts: Kathy and her husband bought the farm they have now been told they have to vacate after independence in 1980, and only after checking with the government that it had no interest in the property.

Lloyd-Roberts: Their plan had been to move the valuables out and live in town until the current troubles pass. But now that she has been physically threatened, and with the thought of the children returning to the house, she is not so sure.

Kirkman: It is difficult to see what you work for, for 10, 13 odd years just possibly disappearing in front of your eyes. It is hard to see all that going. But we still hope to be here. I still feel that we will come back and we will pick up the pieces and carry on.

Lloyd-Roberts: The white farmers of Zimbabwe may face an uncertain future but at least they have escape routes. If their situation becomes untenable many have told me they have families and friends standing by in the cities and the country who are prepared to take them in. Others don't like to admit it publicly but say they are planning to farm in neighbouring Mozambique or South Africa or maybe as far afield as New Zealand. But faced with famine and drought the majority of blacks in this country have nowhere to go. In the village of some 200 people in the Midlands, between Matabeleland and Mashonaland, they have just 20 kilos of maize, the staple diet here, left to last until the next harvest next June. This lady says her family's supply will probably last another week. She prepares the one meal of the day - cow's intestine and a tomato. The problem is, it is to feed a family of 16. Her father, Sema Deya, like thousands of black workers, was laid off from a commercial farm. Now he says the family will starve.

Sema Deya translation: I have two cows left. And then nothing. Life was good when I had the wage. It was not a good idea to invade the white farms.

Lloyd-Roberts: During the election earlier this year, the village made the mistake of supporting the opposition party, the MDC - the Movement for Democratic Change. Now they are being punished. This family is fairly typical. The father has died of AIDS and the family is now living on wild nuts. Food analysts say Zimbabwe only has enough food left to feed half its 13 million people. The government is making sure that the opposition starves first. At a human rights organisation in the neighbouring town, I am shown the names of over 1,000 heads of families in one region who have been deliberately denied food. One of them explains why.

Ezra Ncube translation: When the food truck arrives in a village, everyone chants Zanu PF slogans like, "Long live Robert Mugabe", "Down with the whites", "Down with the MDC." Anyone who does not have Zanu PF membership card is accused of being in support of whites and Tony Blair and told to get their food from Number Ten Downing Street in London. Most people don't even know where London is. I tell you that people are starving and dying.

Lloyd-Roberts: The politicisation of food extends to the millions of pounds of aid now entering the country. The British are offering £30 million a year to the government to help buy food. Zimbabweans fear that that money will go straight to Robert Mugabe's supporters. Food shortages and fear are now stalking the country. I was advised to take pictures of the queues you see everywhere through tinted car windows. You can be arrested for recording reality in Zimbabwe today. In the supermarkets there are queues but no bread, in this the country that was once the bread basket of southern Africa. For the whites, the absurdity is that the land feeding the country is being handed to those who are ill equipped for the job.

Peter Rosenfels: Many of the settlers don't actually live here. They have jobs in the city and come out for weekends.

Lloyd-Roberts: Peter Rosenfels' farm is some 300 miles to the west in Matabeleland where nearly every white farm has been invaded. Hundreds of acres lie fallow as he has been prevented by the settlers from planting.

Rosenfels: Zimbabwe is the most amazing paradox at the moment. The country's government ministers are getting around the world begging for food. At the same time they have criminalised those who are growing the food.

Lloyd-Roberts: His family has been here since his great great grandfather, Omagh, crossed the Limpopo in 1894.

Rosenfels: We have been declared enemies of the state. We have been told we must give up everything we have owned and leave. To where? I am a Zimbabwean and I have nowhere else to go.

Lloyd-Roberts: He has laid off 30 workers and the only thing making any profit is his small pickling business. What do the remaining workers think of the settlers?

Female worker translation: They don't help the country and they are not productive. They just sit around doing nothing.

Lloyd-Roberts: In all, some 3,000 white farmers and half a million of their black workers could be displaced, but could this have been avoided if the white farmers had done more 20 years ago at independence to bring the blacks into commercial farming?

Mac Crawford: Yes, there were injustices. Yes, there were imbalances in the past. But that should have been corrected and done properly. Asking me to stand up and defend or asking me to correct it is wrong. I have my own life and my family's and I want to live a normal life.

Lloyd Roberts: But those left in Zimbabwe are now well aware that life can never be normal again.

Rosenfels: The day to day life is very tense. Early morning and early evening there is a roll call duty around the district. Everyone calls in on radio to make sure everyone else is fine and we carry on our lives like that.

Rosenfels: Cheers, out. It is similar to the way it was during the height of the bush war and we have gone straight back to that type of life where you are living right on the edge.

Lloyd-Roberts: For the whites it is the end of a lifestyle. Most blacks live in fear of their lives. These are the feet of a person who had burning logs held to his feet... Another human rights organisation showed me recent pictures of MDC supporters tortured and killed for the wrong political affiliation. There is no-one these people can appeal to. The police act as agents of a brutal government.

Ncube: I know I am going to die but this country should change. I know my children are suffering at the present moment. If the police arrive at my home my children run away screaming, saying "They are coming to kill my father." You can't live in a country like that. It is very difficult.

Lloyd-Roberts: Many blacks say it is a lottery as to what will finish them off first. Mugabe's henchmen, AIDS or starvation.

The "settlers" are now going to find that food just doesn't spring up out of the earth (surprise, thieves). It takes a lot of work and skill, two qualities lacking in their entirerty in these bums.

You know, a 'crisis' would describe some situation that is out of the ordinary. What is going on in Zimbabwe is the normal course of affairs and has been so for years.

Rhodesia will arise from the ashes. The Kafirs will run this once thriving country back to the condition it was in when the whites first came. The liberal media will be shocked to see how fast that will happen.

When Rhodesia arises, they will never accept another UN demand or mandate. Those blacks who work for the good of the country will prosper. Those who fight against it will perish. The UN will be left to sit on the banks of the East River and pound sand.

The "settlers" are now going to find that food just doesn't spring up out of the earth (surprise, thieves).

You assume they ever had any intention of allowing the seized farms to produce food.

It is not in Mugabe's interest to have any viable farming happen in Zimbabwe, or to have most of the current population survive the year. The thing that produces foreign exchange to line his pockets is the mining industry. He only needs the miners and a few people in the service economy. All the rest can die

As long as there is no domestic food production, Mugabe and Zanu PF have total control over who gets food, and thus who will live and who will die

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