Ripped to shreds - Zimbabwe's judicial system in tatters after years of government assaults***"Any judge who has been brave enough to take positions against government institutions has been harassed and intimidated into resigning," said Ashwin Trikamjee, a member of the International Bar Association's human rights institute. Now, on the rare occasions now when the courts rule against the government, it is usually in cases too obvious to have been decided any other way, many local lawyers said. The government has ignored those rulings anyway.***
Wary and defiant, a Zimbabwe farmer hunkers down - "what are they going to do, shoot me?" *** Mugabe likes to refer to Zimbabwe's white farmers as ''neocolonialists'' and ''British stooges.'' Over a dinner of fish and chips in his chilly dining room, Shand said he is a ''Zimbabwean, an African, first and foremost.'' His mother's family came from England, his father's from South Africa. Lyn, his wife, goes back further: Three generations of family are buried in their front garden. The couple once visited Europe on a three-month holiday; he hasn't been back since. ''It's the last place in the world I would want to live,'' he said.
After leaving school, Shand served in the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit, to fight Mugabe's guerrilla movement. After Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, many whites in Rhodesia, as the country was then known, moved to South Africa, fearing black rule. But Shand stayed because he believed Mugabe's promises of reconciliation. Shand said he did not oppose land redistribution to help landless blacks. ''The majority of white farmers are in favor of land reform, but we want it done in a systematic manner,'' he said. ''Not like this.''
Like many white farmers, Shand has invested his hopes in a recent High Court ruling forbidding the state from seizing property if the banks carrying mortgages on the property had not been informed of the evictions. But Mugabe has ignored unfavorable judgments in the past, and in a fiery speech Monday he warned his government would ''brook no impediment and suffer no avoidable delays.''***