Posted on 05/21/2005 5:56:38 PM PDT by blam
White farmers reject Mugabe plea to return
By Toby Harnden , Chief Foreign Correspondent
(Filed: 22/05/2005)
White farmers evicted by Robert Mugabe's government have reacted with contempt to an offer that they should return to Zimbabwe to take part in "joint ventures" with those who brutalised them and stole their land.
Gideon Gono, the governor of the country's central bank, suggested the idea last Thursday as a possible solution to Zimbabwe's economic crisis.
A Zimbabwean woman surveys her devastated maize crop
Greg McMurray, a tobacco farmer who fled Zimbabwe in 2001 and is now a grinder at a factory in Wiltshire, said: "These are empty promises. We have had all the assurances before and then they just turn around and change their minds.
"I had them coming into my garden and threatening my fiancée. Men with a bit of beer in their bellies told me, 'We'll come and burn you and your wife and your house'.
"I would love to go back but the economy's in ruins. The place is a shambles. So many professional people have left. It would need a new regime before most of us would think seriously about going back."
The prospect of a return for white farmers was dangled by Mr Gono, Mr Mugabe's leading economic policy maker, in a rambling three-hour statement in which he also announced a 31 per cent devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar.
He said: "In order to ensure maximum productivity levels, there is great scope in the country promoting and supporting joint ventures between the new farmers with progressive-minded former operators as well as other new investors, so as to hasten the skills transfer cycle."
During the evictions, some white farmers were murdered and many others were beaten and their families abused. The evictions prompted the collapse of the agriculture sector, the traditional engine of the economy.
Those who took over the farms had no specialist knowledge - and most farmland now lies uncultivated. The machinery has been stolen, buildings have been plundered and the former workers are starving.
Eddie Cross, the economics spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change - which was heavily defeated by the ruling Zanu-PF party in recent parliamentary elections that were widely condemned as being rigged - said that Mr Gono was desperate.
Mr Cross said: "He's got no power and he can't deliver. The reality is a thousand miles away from everything he says. He wants to regain some credibility with multilateral institutions. He has meetings with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank next month. This is about having something to say to those guys. The only salvation will be a change of government and a return to the rule of law.
"Until then, no one's going to invest here or come back. Who on earth is going to do anything in agriculture when there is such dispute over land ownership? They'd be mad."
While Mr Gono's words could be interpreted as an admission that the land seizure policy pursued by Mr Mugabe - which led to him becoming an international pariah - had failed, they offered little comfort to the dispossessed.
One tobacco and cattle farmer, who was forced off his property by armed squatters in 2000, said: "He can't be serious. My house has been burnt down, my fields destroyed and he wants to invite me back?
"There has to be a proper return to respect for property rights. We need facts, not words and a legal framework. No one's going to go back on the basis of this."
The man, who asked to remain anonymous, is among 1,600 evicted landowners who have stayed in Zimbabwe and are attempting to get compensation.
In 2000, there were 4,500 white farmers. Now only 400 remain on parts of their farms, many having made deals with Mugabe's regime. Thousands of others lost everything and have had to seek help to set themselves up in ventures outside Zimbabwe.
Colin Ransome, of the Zimbabwe Farmers Trust Fund, a Scottish-registered charity, said: "A lot of those who settled in Britain have young families and new jobs. Everyone is very wary. Iron-clad assurances would be needed."
And that's the facts, Jack.
Mugabe is 81.
Close, but not quite. Liberals NEVER pony up their OWN money. They'll just lobby the government to make all of us pony up the money to keep Zimbabwe going, while the MSM will be broadcasting non stop images of the "poor victims of the terrible famine"
Let. Zimbabwe. Starve.
Could you and other progressive-minded Jewish physicists please come back to Germany and work on join ventures with our new Aryan physicists to hasten the skills transfer cycle on your atomic fission projects.
Your friend, Adolf
.
.
I the white Zimbabwean farmers are smart enough not to come back until Mugabe and his ilk are hanging by their ankles with piano wire in the center of Harare.
Let them starve.
re: your invitation to return
Dear Mr. Mugabe:
NUTS.
Sincerely,
The guy who used to feed your fat a55.
When the UN comes begging for huge shipments of free food for the starving Zimbabs, what we ill we do? Oh, I know, we'll send the food, Mugabe will appropriate it and sell it, then deposit the money in his already huge Swiss bank accounts. We never learn.
ping--I know people who've hired these evicted farmers in the U.S. Some fled at knifepoint with just the shirts on their backs.
Nam Vet
I agree. Things are upside down, he got the Nobel Peace Prize, remember?
Just desserts Bump.
Well said!
They took the irrigation piping and sold it for scrap metal. They took a saw and cut down the orchards for firewood. But don't worry. The Zimbabweans still have something to eat. They have each other.
except the clowns; they taste funny
just a bit of "just desserts" humor
I would love to start a program where liberals can donate to support farms in Zimbabwe. It will just flush liberal money down the drain. Maybe we could encourage a FarmAid type concert with some leftie bands to make everyone feel good. Conservatives would feel good because the liberals aren't effective at doing anything besides wasting their money, and liberals would feel good despite not being effective, because they "raised awareness," or some such thing.
Thank you, that's even better.
They killed and ate all the livestock and last I read they had begun to eat the protected wildlife.
A reminder of how this all came about, and what some are doing to reverse course.
Parker T. Williamson
http://www.layman.org/layman/the-lay-comm/williamson-parker.htm
Slain missionaries defining moment for Layman editor
Recoin the axiom in today's vernacular, wrap it around the work of Parker T. Williamson, and it would come out something like this: The pen is mightier than bombs, bullets and bad theology.
For Williamson, then a rising national leader and a member of the General Assembly Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (PCUS), a defining moment in his career came with a hail of gunfire more than two decades ago.
During the racially intense civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), guerrillas shot down an unarmed plane. Christian missionaries were among the survivors murdered after the crash.
That event eventually changed Williamson's pulpit from the 600-member First Presbyterian Church in Lenoir, N.C., to the 575,000 Presbyterian households that receive The Presbyterian Layman.
Williamson was a hunger action enabler for the PCUS mission board, which was the equivalent of the reunited denominations General Assembly Council. Toting a stack of brochures depicting children with bloated bellies, Williamson traveled from church to church to raise money for the denominations hunger program.
But unknown to Williamson during his fund-raising trips was that the mission board had politicized the hunger campaign. Besides giving the money he had raised for food and technical assistance, the board, through the World Council of Churches, was financing guerrilla warfare under the guise of “attacking hungers root causes.”
The Rhodesian guerrillas who shot down the plane had been recipients of Presbyterian mission money. “When I found out, I went ballistic,” Williamson said. “I felt I had betrayed Presbyterians by my participation in that program.”
Going public
Williamson mounted the soapbox and began exhorting Presbyterians to oppose the denomination's support of political movements that were bankrolled under the banner of liberation theology.
Langdon S. Flowers, now retired but then chairman of the board of Flowers Industries, Inc., in Thomasville, Ga., heard Williamson speak at a mens conference. He was impressed. He flew Williamson to Washington, D.C., to address a conference on world hunger.
Two members of The Presbyterian Lay Committee heard Williamson speak at the conference. They asked him to serve on The Layman's editorial advisory committee. One thing led to another. Soon, Williamson was writing most of the editorials for The Layman. In 1989, Williamson was named editor. In 1997, he became executive editor of the newspaper and chief operating officer of the Lay Committee.
Providence and genes
A good Calvinist would say that Williamson's journey from Baton Rouge, La., to college philosophy major, to seminarian, to the pulpit, and to the editorship of one of the nation's strongest and most influential religious publications, was the inevitable work of providence. That would be tough to dispute. But so would genes.
His father, Rene de Visme Williamson, was a Harvard-trained professor of political theory, and a quiet, intellectual Calvinist. Rene Williamson gained his understanding of the faith by reading the Bible. He was an early critic of liberation theology, a theological premise that God takes sides in political and social battles and inevitably favors those with the least power regardless of their theological or moral persuasion. He wrote a booklet, The Integrity of the Gospel: A Critique of Liberation Theology, that was published reluctantly by John Knox Press.
With the denominational leadership so sympathetic to liberation theology, the editorial committee of John Knox Press opposed publishing the book. So Parker made them an offer they couldn't refuse: Publish his fathers book, and if it didnt sell, Parker would come up with the money to buy all unsold copies. The Integrity of the Gospel sold out with the John Knox Press imprimatur and without Williamson's funds. But John Knox would not reprint the booklet, nor would it release the copyright so that another publisher might reprint it. Parker badgered them until they relented. The Integrity of the Gospel was reprinted by the Lay Committee, and it sold out again.
As a journalist, Parker T. Williamson has defied liberation theology, now no more than a trickle of the stream that once flooded denominational headquarters. Presbyterians have increasingly earmarked their denominational benevolences so that they cannot be used for political purposes. Donor-designated gifts now account for nearly 74 percent of the PCUSAs mission budget.
Biblical compassion
Biblically and theologically, Williamson is conservative and evangelical. He has a pastor's heart and a gift for rallying people and resources to meet human needs.
Believing that African American citizens should not be denied the right to vote, Williamson was one of three students from Union Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King on his march to Selma. After graduation from Union and Yale University (masters in Christian ethics), Williamson accepted a call to pastor a Presbyterian Church near Tampa, Fla. In Tampa, he helped develop an inner-city ministry in a Hispanic-African American neighborhood.
As a Presbyterian pastor in Lenoir, in the foothills of North Carolina's mountains, Williamson was again on the cutting edge of social change. Leading a biracial church group, with the principal financial guarantee by his own all-white congregation, Williamson helped develop a biracial community of 140 privately-owned homes for people with low to moderate incomes.
Williamson also led the Lenoir church to sponsor other social ministries: a hospice program that has become a national model and Koinonia, a Christian housing program for the elderly.
Setting the record straight
He winces when liberals accuse conservatives of having no compassion for needy people. “They talk a big game about community involvement,” he says. “But I find that they are rarely involved personally. Often they use the church to lobby for government programs whose effectiveness in meeting human needs is not at all clear. It has been my observation that people who take the Scriptures seriously go into the streets, roll up their sleeves and work for and with the poor. You can't read the Scriptures and not be involved.”
A new challenge
Today, Williamson travels extensively for The Layman, both covering events and working with other renewal groups in the PCUSA. Alongside for many trips is Patty Williamson, an elder at First Presbyterian Church in Lenoir, who formerly worked as a congressional staffer in Washington. Her commitment to church and civic projects matches his.
Both enjoy getaways, sailing their 25-foot sloop off the North Carolina coast. But even there, Williamson often refers to his sport using biblical metaphors. He speaks of the wind: whence it comes; wither it goes; how its power is essential to movement; how it allows choices for the skipper who respects its authority and senses its direction.
“But you cannot defy the wind,” says Williamson. Hence his metaphor: for a sailor, the wind is analogous to the breath or spirit of God. You can defy bullets, bombs, bad theology and the words of scoffers, but not the breath of God.
Parker Williamson has stood firm in the face of theological aberrances: the homosexual ordination movement; the Sophia movement (goddess worship); church funding for radical groups that preach and practice violence; New Age movements within the denomination; and misuse of money intended by Presbyterians to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Each edition of The Layman is both a stand against human-blown winds of doctrine and an appeal to a higher power, the God whose spirit birthed the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) with roots deeply anchored in biblical and Reformed theology, and with Jesus Christ at the helm of his church.
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