New Zealand renews demand for Zimbabwe to be expelled from British-led Commonwealth*** Clark - an outspoken critic of Mugabe - said she was "very, very shocked" by Mugabe's comments and angry the international community was being asked to help out an "outrageous" government. Zimbabwe "should have been suspended (from the British Commonwealth) quite some time ago and I would be very happy to see them suspended now," she added. In March, Zimbabwe was suspended for a year from the councils of the Commonwealth - a move that fell short of expulsion - for the "high level of politically motivated violence" that marred March 9-11 presidential elections.***
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Zimbabwe's deadlock over land*** Raymond, a clerk in an agricultural store more than 50 miles away, came for the holiday weekend to build a new house on the land he has been allocated by the government. He plans to keep living in the city, but says he will settle three or four families on his 70-acre plot, to work the land for him. Perhaps he will choose them from the more than a million farm workers who will likely also lose their homes as a result of Zimbabwe's land redistribution.
More than 100 families live and work on the farm where his plot is located. And there are other complications. Raymond says that though he has been promised seed and fertilizer from the government, he realizes the government has no money for such things. Seed for corn, he also says, is hard to come by because the government has taken all the seed-corn farms. But seed corn once grew on the plot where he's now building his house.
Raymond is a bit sheepish about settling on land that once belonged to someone else. He pulls a pink newspaper from his belongings and opens it to an article about white farmers being evicted from their land. "So sad," he says, displaying the article. "So sad." While the white farmers will lose their land and the decades of hard work they put into it, few will go away destitute. Most will drive away with a little savings and their personal belongings. It is the estimated one million black farm workers who stand to lose the most in the country's land reform. Most have nowhere to go. Desperate, many are refusing to allow their employers to leave until they pay compensation.