Posted on 06/03/2008 6:14:59 PM PDT by blam
Zimbabwe crisis: White farming couple beaten and kicked off land
By David Blair
Last Updated: 2:06AM BST 04/06/2008
A white farming couple was assaulted, whipped and shot at after they were given two minutes to leave their property in Zimbabwe.
William Rogers and his wife, Annette, were threatened by three Robert Mugabe supporters, who told them: "We are like hungry lions."
Dozens of Zimbabwe's last white farmers have suffered similar ordeals since Mr Mugabe lost the presidential election's first round in March. Scores of black opposition supporters have been murdered and thousands beaten, abducted or tortured.
After defying the two-minute warning to leave, Mr and Mrs Rogers took refuge in their home on Chigwell farm. A gang of a dozen men soon gathered outside.
"They started smashing windows and the front door was smashed open," said Mr Rogers. One of the men produced a gun and opened fire. "He fired a shot directly at us which went just over my head and close to my wife's head," said Mr Rogers. "He obviously intended to kill us."
The couple retreated upstairs and listened, terrified, as the gang began heaping together a fire in their living room, using the wreckage of their back door.
"We thought we would be burnt alive, which is when I said that we would come out," said Mr Rogers. He grabbed a shotgun and led his wife downstairs. The ringleader ordered him to hand over his weapon. Men seized Mrs Rogers and grabbed her by the throat.
Then the mob set upon both the farmer and his wife with sticks and pipes. "They dragged my wife outside and they were trying to strangle her," said Mr Rogers. "She managed to bite the hand of the man who was grabbing her round the throat.
"He started to beat her. At one time, there were at least four men beating and kicking her."
Bruised and bleeding, the couple were tied up and hurled into the back of a pickup. Finally, at least five hours after the first calls for help, the local police responded. Four armed officers freed Mr and Mrs Rogers, who were taken to Harare, the capital, for emergency treatment. They are now recovering.
During the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, many of the white citizens fled the country, but the farmers stayed and tried to “make a go of it”. It worked for about 20 years until Mugabe needed a scapegoat for political purposes, then he started his “land reform” (forced sales and/or confiscations of white-owned farms) back about 2001.
It has been downhill, of course, since then. Before Mugabe’s communistic rampage, Zimbabwe was able to feed itself and sell food to surrounding nations.
One could perhaps make an argument that the land was “taken” from natives by an earlier generation of white settlers, but as we know, two wrongs do not make a right.
Besides, when a nation has a successful farming system, it is national suicide to destroy it. But then Marxists, such as Mugabe, were never long on common sense.
Exactly! I spent a month there during 1981 in Bulawayo about 6 months after Mugabe took over. Nice infrastructure thanks to the former Rhodesia. But we were not accustomed to this on February 11: two tribal factions within the Zimbabwe army got into a dispute. Net result: 300 dead citizens caught in the crossfire over the next week. Hours after we turned off an intersection, one army faction ambushed a armored convoy killing 60.
Returned to Bulawayo in 2000. What a change! On flying in, I was pulled out of the customs line. As a U.S. citizen, they required a special entry fee - $10 (US) as I recall.
Infrastructure had gone down the tube. Gas lines ala our 70's. Yet later while traveling in neighboring Botswana, there was gas aplenty -- modern well stocked supermarkets.
Economically, Zimbabwe has shot themselves in the foot. Yet, Jacques Diouf, Director General of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, denounces the West about Africa's problems:
"No one understands… how over-consumption by obese people in the [Western] world costs $20 billion each year."
And it isn't because the farmers were white and the attackers were black. This has happened before, in places where both sides were the same ethnic group.
What you have is the results of liberalism allowed to run free. This is our future, sadly, and there is no where else to go.
So what would you do in their situation? What will you do when you see cries of property/wealth redistribution at the point of the sword? And I don't mean the taxes we have now, but in situations like this.
I may have used the shotgun and taken some of them with me before they killed me.
Ina material sense,perhaps.Though colonial rule was not implememted to benefit the Africans,but the European colonizers.
The illogic of your thinking to me-and with all respect-is that colonial society was based on what I think is a liberal rationale-”Oh,those poor colored people.They are so helpless and incapable.The need the white man to provide for them”
To me that attitude is similiar to white libs in THIS country.Stay on the Dem plantation and we will take care of you.
Doesn’t work here and it really didn’t work too well for Africans.
If the USA gets to this stage, there will be no place else on earth to go for refuge. We will have to fight here, or face extinction.
Winston Churchill commented on that concept.
Reagan did... “A Time for Choosing”.
You'd be hard-pressed to say the residents of "Zimbabwe" are better off than were the residents of "Rhodesia".
I'll concede colonies of other-then-England (Germany and Belgium, for example) did not fare so well.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.Its the political “leadership”and tribalism that holds back places like Zimbabwe.They still look to the “Big Man”concept as a viable political philosophy.
I teach part time in a big urban district.Its a truism that almost all the “black”students in the advanced AP classes are of African origin and almost NO Africans are found in Special Ed!
So its not the people,its the culture of corruption.
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