Posted on 04/21/2002 4:56:13 PM PDT by blam
April 22, 2002
Mugabe's farm endgame recalls Stalin
From Jan Raath in Harare
AFTER about 50 years of farming in Zimbabwe, Guy Cartwright and his wife, Rosalind, are left with a rented flat in Harare, two vehicles, furniture and a pension worth £5.77 a month after the Government seized their property. Two weeks ago his 4,000-acre farm, Waltondale in Marondera, with assets apart from the land worth £900,000, including 260,000kg of tobacco just harvested, 600 head of cross-bred cattle, eight tractors and two dams, came under the control of Brigadier (retired) Ambrose Mutinhiri, the local MP for President Mugabe’s ruling Zanu (PF) party.
On April 12, he allowed the Mr Cartwright, 69, to take some of their personal effects from the homestead. Much, including valuable antiques, has been destroyed or looted. Everything else he was ordered to leave behind. The farm had not even been listed by authorities for confiscation and resettlement. Mr Mutinhiri has produced an unsigned document that allegedly allocates him 1,000 acres of Waltondale.
The Cartwrights’ flat is bare except for a couple of suitcases and two armchairs. “We’ve been through being scared, the anger. Now we’ve collapsed in a heap. What do we do now?” Mrs Cartwright, 61, asked.
Since the flawed presidential elections last month, 150 white farmers have been evicted illegally from their properties and the pace is gathering. Among the new occupants of the properties are Cabinet ministers, MPs and senior officers of the Army, police, secret police and the prisons department.
The farmers have been told that they have to leave behind all their farming equipment, crops and livestock.
Some managed quietly to move their equipment into storage but since then police have set up roadblocks in many areas and ordered lorries caught carrying farm implements to return the goods.
Behind the wave of lawless seizures of land and equipment lies a bizarre strategy comparable to Stalin’s collectivisation of farms, and it promises the same frightening consequences. Maize meal, the national staple, is in desperately short supply, and the situation is about to deteriorate rapidly.
The maize crop about to be harvested has been reduced by drought and the wholesale disruption of white commercial farms. Supplies of wheat will run out in July. White farmers have traditionally produced almost enough to meet demand, but tens of thousands of acres of land in the winter wheat-growing areas lie bare.
White farmers have been allowed to carry out almost no planting. Instead, Joseph Made, the Agriculture Minister, has urged “emergent” black commercial farmers to move on to land that has been allocated to them. When the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) asks officials how the new occupants will manage to grow the wheat crop, they are told, “By using existing infrastructure” — the white farmers’ equipment.
Mr Made said on April 12 that he would soon issue regulations to force evicted farmers to leave behind their equipment. None has been issued yet but the seizures are being carried out anyway.
The only mention of compensation was contained in a threat from Mr Made yesterday. “Their (white farmers’) objective is to destroy the infrastructure in farms we have resettled by our new farmers. There will be no compensation for those who vandalise equipment,” he said.
The wheat crop has to be planted by early next month. Later than that, yields diminish rapidly and before long late-planted seed will produce no grain at all. There is no sign of the seed and fertiliser that Mr Made has promised. Farmers forced off their land have switched off the electricity supplies for which they pay. It has not been explained how the new occupants are expected almost immediately to pick up the complicated technicalities of managing irrigation.
Mr Made’s plan to grow winter maize has been greeted with disbelief. The crop is highly sensitive to frost and will not germinate without high humidity. The Government says that it has just planted 4,500 acres in fallow canal-irrigated sugar plantations in the arid south-eastern Lowveld region.
“It’s been tried before and it didn’t work,” Jerry Grant, CFU deputy director, said.
“Even if they do manage to get germination, the yields will be so low and the whole operation would have been so costly that it would have been cheaper to import it.”
They (and everyone else) should help the remaining ones leave & just let the country return to a state of nature.
That's what the natives want.
So, is Ambrose going to shere the land with the war vets [whoever they are.]
The war on the krulaks is just beginning.
Once the famine starts in earnest, Mugabe will be touting the former white farmers as "Wreckers" and as responsible for the peoples starvation. Their lives won't be worth a plugged nickle.
This is going to get ugly, very ugly.
After thousands of unnecessary deaths the UN will decide it's time to bleat and make some pitiful effort, while laying the blame on the West.
-ccm
Maybe they're too busy blaming the Jews for Arab savagery.
Imal
Not likely.
The "war vets" are simply young thugs who have absolutely no experience of war. They are sturmabteilung who will, once they have served their purpose, become a danger to the state and will have to be eliminated.
Yeah, right! [LOL] There will be no compensation for leaving it intact either. The term "new farmers" will be something to be aware of. It translates loosely as "Marxist thieves".
Aesop knew all about these sorts of people ( and I use that term loosely ! ) , millenia ago. The story abot the dog in the manger , quickly comes to mind. Then , there is the old , old adage about cutting off one's nose, to spite one's face . I guess that African balcks don't have such warning tales, in their heritage , or are just too evil, to have aid much attention to them , if they do.
There will be NO food, at all, quite soon. Then what ? Will Mugabe's thugs then raid South Africa ?
,,, the heritage of the black Africans couldn't have prepared them for the stupidity of Mugabe's Communist nightmare that will starve them.
Mugabe's plan is for to have all who oppose him starve first.
He doesn't need peasants. All he needs is enough people to work the mines and produce the export goods he needs to line his pockets with
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