Posted on 07/11/2004 4:39:18 AM PDT by Ironfocus
Harare - The exodus of Zimbabwe's small and anguished white population is under way with record numbers leaving their homeland, mostly for Britain or Australia.
Few have the R30 000($5000) they need in foreign currency to transport their goods to new countries, and most are starting new lives with 22kg of clothes and a few photographs.
They say they have hung on during the past four tumultuous years hoping President Robert Mugabe's "hate" campaign against them would ease, but it did not, and two months ago when he shut down private schools for a week for raising fees, they lost their nerve.
Up to three million black Zimbabweans have also gone into exile, Estate agents say there has been a flood of houses on to the property market in the past few weeks that has slashed prices to record lows. Thousands of homes from bungalows to mansions along suburban avenues are on sale for as little as R150 000 ($25,000).
Up to three million black Zimbabweans have also gone into exile, mostly for economic reasons, but they hope to return one day. Most whites, of whom perhaps 30 000 remain in Zimbabwe, say they will never return.
"It was a painful decision because this is the only home we know," said Jeremy Callow, 55, one of Zimbabwe's best-known lawyers. "I love Zimbabwe, love the people, but can't take it any more."
The "last straw" is different for each family who boards the planes for distant lands.
Callow succumbed to "relentless" pressure traipsing through the courts to assist white farmers legally recover possessions, and when he succeeded, applying in vain to get court orders enforced.
'I can't cope any longer with seeing grown men cry' "I spent 80 percent of my time with farmers counselling them and I am not trained for that, nor can I cope any longer with seeing grown men cry.
"The courts do not have the capacity to process thousands of farms seized by the state. So they change the laws, move the goal posts."
Under a new law ahead of the flawed presidential elections in 2002, Callow, like thousands of other whites born in the country, had to renounce access to British or other foreign claims to citizenship to vote.
"It is costing an arm and a leg to claim my British citizenship now," he said.
Among about 350 white farmers who remain on the land enduring varying levels of instability are some who have never been touched by ruling Zanu-PF party militants but are now abandoning their homes.
"We have recently noticed quite a number who have been left alone the last four years but are leaving," said Hendrik Olivier, the director of the remnants of the once 4 000-strong Commercial Farmers' Union.
One of Zimbabwe's most successful younger industrialists, who asked not to be named, decided to go to Australia a few months after his family was attacked in December in their home about 20km south of Harare. The family moved to the city and tried to settle in a new and glamourous mansion in a leafy suburb. It is now up for sale.
"We couldn't recover. In April I sold my business and as soon as our work permit arrives we will go.
"We have young kids and schools are a problem. I will miss it, especially the bush. We have family in South Africa, but the future is uncertain there."
John Winward, 57, spent Monday night detained in police cells in Karoi, once a prosperous, pretty village 210km north of Harare.
Under pressure from Zanu-PF invaders to get off his farm last week, Winward went to the local police with court orders proving he was allowed to remain until September to process about R1,5 million of crops.
"The policeman didn't believe or understand the court order and locked me up for the night.
"I wish now we had quit when the heat was on a couple of years ago, but I couldn't walk away. I wasted time and money going to court to fight the inevitable.
"If I am left alone to get my tobacco and maize off and sell the cattle, then we will leave for Britain in a few weeks. We won't take anything; we can't afford to."
Father of four, Chris Shepherd, 38, forced off his Karoi farm 21 months ago and now almost penniless in Harare said he would never leave and waited for signs that the madness was waning.
"I am going to Australia at the end of the month to look for a job, perhaps as a labourer, and I do this with a heavy heart," he said.
David Coltart, an Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MP, said: "This is ethnic cleansing, not in the Bosnian sense of the phrase, as they knew they couldn't get away with wholesale murder, it's more subtle, designed to drive out whites because Mugabe believes whites provide funding and administrative support to the MDC.
"A year ago [information] minister Jonathan Moyo said whites would be 'sent out of the country' because they created the MDC. They are woefully mistaken if they think that driving them out will crush the MDC," he said.
"The laws were changed to deprive whites of any land they owned. Private schools were closed to get at whites even though most pupils are black.
"Mugabe said whites were 'enemies of the people' and he is still hammering away at them." - Foreign Service
Hmmm yes if you don't take care of yourself. I meet people from these areas who defy the statistics.
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ghana_statistics.html
Besides if I was to move to Africa, I'd move here where I have the most connections. Zambia is up and coming because they're taking in all the farmers that Mugabe doesn't want.
They missed a supporter of Rhodesia by a few years. Ronald Reagan had the 'nerve' to meet with Ian Smith. Too bad... the peanut farmer has a lot to answer for when he dies. Sinning in his heart is the least of them.
CRIME: In Gabon, petty thievery is common. Violent crime is more common in urban areas and there have been cases of armed robberies in homes and in restaurants frequented by foreigners. While crime in general does not appear to specifically target Americans or westerners, it continues to affect the neighborhoods and establishments frequented by foreigners.
The U.S. Embassy encourages Americans to take extra precautions when traveling in Libreville. To prevent carjacking, citizens are encouraged to travel with their automobile windows up and doors locked. Marginal neighborhoods, poorly lit streets and unfamiliar areas of the city should be avoided, especially at night. Walking or running on the beach alone at night should be avoided. If you do decide to visit the beach at night, do so with friends. When dining in restaurants or visiting markets, it is recommended that you carry only minimal amounts of cash and avoid wearing excessive amounts of jewelry. The Embassy encourages citizens to choose restaurants with locked entrances and security guards to minimize the risk of armed attacks. Credit cards are not widely accepted except at hotels, and because of the high rates of credit card fraud, their use is not recommended. If involved in an attempted robbery or carjacking, citizens are encouraged to comply with attackers to avoid injury and to report all incidents to the police and to the U.S. Embassy.
http://travel.state.gov/gabon.html
Malaria is found in many parts of Central Africa, including Gabon. P. falciparum malaria, the serious and sometimes fatal strain in Gabon, is resistant to the anti-malarial drug chloroquine. Because travelers to Gabon are at high risk for contracting malaria, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advise that travelers should take one of the following antimalarial drugs: mefloquine (Lariam™), doxycycline, or atovaquone/proguanil (Malarone™).
In recent years, Gabon has been subject to limited outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which have generally been confined to remote rural areas of the country. Ebola is a severe, often fatal viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) that is transmitted by contact with an infected person's blood, bodily fluids and tissues. The virus is not transmitted through casual contact, and it is only contagious during its active phase. No vaccine or antiviral medication is available for treatment of Ebola hemorrhagic fever.
Okay so what's your point? I don't if I want to go out with guys in NYC because of STDs.
My statistics come from the CIA.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/gh.html
CRIME: Although criminal activity is more common in urban areas, violent crimes such as murder, armed robbery, and rape are infrequent throughout the country. Visitors to large cities should be aware that parked cars are regularly targeted for opportunistic smash-and-grab thefts, and they are cautioned to avoid leaving any possessions unattended in a vehicle, even in the trunk. Due to the high incidence of such crimes, motorists in Montreal and some other jurisdictions can be fined for leaving their car doors unlocked or for leaving valuables in view.
http://travel.state.gov/canada.html
You're not posting anything that these people already know. You do know that ironfocus is South African right? So someone talks about living in a particular country and you post info for tourists. People already living there have their own arrangements. Not everyone drops dead at 30 or dies of AIDS.
The point is that Gabon is not a place I would like to live. But each to his or her own.
They are fortunate to escape with their lives and limbs. Racism is quite ugly.
You are right to each his own. However, there are people that say the same about the United States and wouldn't live here. You'd be upset, and frankly I would too. My own grandmother would not come back to US and there's nothing to convince her otherwise.
But Henry Kisinger (for some reason, I cannot think of how he spells it), put tremendous pressure on South Africa and the Shah of Iran to cut off trade with Rhodesia, and forced Ian Smith to agree to "Majority Rule" by 1980.
That was during the Carter Administration, but the agreement to surrender by that date was forged during Ford's Administration. I remember this very vividly, as it was the reason that I could not vote for Ford. I have no words that are adequate to express my contempt for what was done to Rhodesia on his watch. Remember, these people modeled their Declaration of Independence in part on our own; they had build a veritable paradise in the middle of Africa; they represented a true flowering of Western Culture. And to compound the tragedy, they had a population that was producing perhaps the highest percentage of genius types on the planet--for comparison, six times the rate of the White population of California.
One can never prove, what might have been. But strangling Rhodesia in the 1970s may have been a tragedy almost equivalent to what would have obtained, had classical Greece been destroyed in 440 BC. This was a new nation, about to flower for the benefit of civilization, itself.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Don't you think it would have been different if Reagan was president?I do.
"I understand the hard truth, more than you can know. However, I still wish to make 2 points. The first is that I would like to know which national interest of the US was protected in Vietnam, Bosnia and Somalia? The US went to war in those countries."
Vietnam, Bosnia and Somalia. Three different cases, so here is my take. The first example was the defense of South Vietnam. This was one of the two major 'hot' fronts in the Cold war against the communist empire of the Soviet Union, the other being South Korea. The ability to confront the Soviet Union strategically was limited on the nuclear front by the number of nuclear warheads built by both sides, with MAD being ethos of the decades-long direct military standoff. After the Cuban Missile crisis, the USSR had been embarrassed by the US Naval embargo of Cuba and decided to try to challenge the United States Navy at sea with a massive and expensive naval buildup of their own. However, the US found a way to confront the USSR through its communist proxy in North Vietnam in the southeast Asia conflict. The US was still reserving its 'Sunday punch' for any conflict with the USSR in Europe, seeing the conflict in South Vietnam as a sideshow, just a way of slowing or stopping the spread of communist dictatorships just as the US and Allies had in South Korea. The cold war confrontation from the late 1940s to the early 1990s against the Soviet Union cost the United States over 115,000 lives and 13 trillion dollars, with a somewhat substantial portion of those lives and treasure being spent in Vietnam. It was a way for the United States to apply its economic power against that of the USSR, as North Vietnam did not have the resources to compete with United States. Unlike their capital intensive naval buildup, large portions of the GDP of the USSR went to subside the North Vietnamese, and were destroyed in that conflict. Trucks, tanks, APCs, artillery, SAMs, aircraft, engines, parts, rifles, ammunition, POL, economic credits, food, etc were all provided primarily by the USSR to North Vietnam. Much of it was destroyed before the North Vietnamese army victory over the South Vietnamese in 1975; good news for the communists of the North, but at a very great economic cost to the USSR, which they could ill afford. The strategic import of the conflict in Vietnam to the United States was to continue the cold war conflict with the USSR, resist and make costly any territorial encroachment, make hollow the economy of the USSR by forcing them to spend their limited hard currency in support of their attempted worldwide Marxist empire with nonrecoverable or sustaining expenditures. South Vietnam did fall, at great economic cost to the Soviet Union.
Bosnia and Somalia. Well Somalia was an emergency food delivery mission gone bad. Not intended to be much different from what the US has done in Haiti a few times. The Clinton Administration let mission creep overtake the effort, and when US casualties resulted pulled back from the 'multinational' effort as fast as they could do so. There was no strategic interest in Somalia at the time, today it might have some attention due to the 'War on Terror'. Bosnia was important only as far as it allowed NATO to have relevance in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet empire. This concern about NATO was due to the fact that the European powers could not seem to successfully confront a mini-rerun of the 1940s fascism which had killed so many millions when it went unopposed in 1940s Europe. Outside of the military and political structure of NATO, the sadly laughable incompetence of the major European powers was on display for all to see and forced the United States to step into the situation since the only strategic import to the United States was to demonstrate the viability of NATO and its continued US leadership to the post-Soviet world. It became strategically important to the United States for the European nations to succeed under the umbrella of the US led NATO to ensure the appearance of the viability of their military and political contribution to European continental security. Once this 'competence' was demonstrated, the rationale for reducing the US military footprint in Europe would be strengthened.
"I do disagree with your statements of "stupid" and "no sympathy". Those are cruel, hard statements to make. Have you ever had to leave your country, culture, family and life behind? I guarantee you it is not easy, and requires resourcefulness, opportunity, courage and faith, and all the help you can get, and not all those people have it at their disposal."
The statements are not cruel, they are truthful. Unforeseen problems which overtake individuals engender sympathy. A hurricane or tornado hits destroys a populated area, generates sympathy and assistance for example. A major storm which wrecks houses built right on an Atlantic beach-front, or when new houses are built on land directly underneath a long-existing airport flight path do not generate that same sympathetic response. Some things in life are foreseeable.
While I myself have not had to uproot from my home, my ancestors who arrived in the 1600 and 1700s did have to leave all behind to come here to what is now the United States. It is the story of America, and we welcome others to give it a try. Look where it got us...
However, God does have a sense of irony. Given all the economic and social problems African nations currently have, where affliction and hardship go, He also sends strength. A case in point is the gradual destruction of my denomination the Episcopal Church in the aforesaid materially well-off United States. The division over the ordination to the priesthood of women and gays has led to the much publicized split between the large liberal and smaller more traditional wings of the Anglican Church. The traditionalists have been fortunate enough to have the support of the Anglican Bishops of our African brethren from Uganda and other African nations. This is important as the Anglican Church recognizes the authority of its Bishops in the creation of new congregations and the ordination of new priests. Without this vital support the traditional Episcopalians would either default back to the Roman Catholic church, or wither away completely. Given the prevalence of animists and Muslims on the African continent, it takes great strength of character to become and stay an adherent of one of the lesser branches of the Christian faith. The successful advent of democratic capitalism on a continent as rich as Africa combined with a resolute faith and self-disipline would led to great advances and wealth in the future. Let the twin fevers of Marxism and tribal dictatorship burn themselves out and there is a bright future ahead. Until that time the whites of Africa should expect to relocate as envy is a human fault not restricted just to the current situation in Africa.
Best of luck.
dvwjr
We should all pray that christianity grows even faster than it is already and overtakes tribalism and more importantly islam.
NAACP...leading the way!
Carter was a simpleton sock puppet for the scumbag Democrats in Georgia until he, amazingly, was able to ride the Watergate backlash to become President of the United States in 1976. He was voted in by a public who, at that point, basically only wanted somebody they never heard of before.
Carter was utterly and completely clueless on anything political outside of Georgia. When it came to domestic policy, Carter did what the liberal scumbags who controlled Congress told him to do, and when it came to anything international, Carter did exactly what the scumbag Democrat/communist contingent in the State Department told him to do.
He really had little choice in these matters because he didn't know enough about anything to arrive at his own policy convictions, and so he followed the lead of the people he found himself surrounded by in the White House. And naturally, these people happened to be leftist Democrat scumbags.
Carter couldn't find Africa on a globe.
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