[Cincinatus' Wife]

Zimbabwe Urges Blacks to Move on to White Farms*** HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's justice minister urged landless blacks Tuesday to move on to white-owned farms, setting the stage for a possible confrontation with white farmers defying eviction orders. "Those who have been allocated land should move to the farms and utilize it," Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the state-owned Herald newspaper.

President Robert Mugabe's government, pushing ahead with its land reform program to resettle landless blacks, has ordered 2,900 of the country's remaining 4,500 white commercial farmers to quit their land without compensation, but nearly two-thirds have defied an August 8 deadline and refused to leave their farms.

About 200 defiant farmers had been arrested by late Monday, of which more than 40 have been charged and released on bail. Police said the latest arrest figures for Tuesday were not yet available.

Farmers' lobby group Justice for Agriculture declined to comment on Chinamasa's remarks. The disruption to agriculture in Zimbabwe, once the bread-basket of southern Africa, comes as millions in the region face food shortages. ***

[Technocrat]

Has anybody heard of even one instance where the farmers have confronted and killed the invaders? Do any of these people have a backbone? A lot of these guys are in their 70s and 80s - they should be far more cantankerous and far less caring about their own lives. Sonething doesn't compute here. We are being denied critical information, either on one side, or on the other.

[Space Wrangler]

In very short order, Mugabe will have turned Zimbabwe into a desert, and the calls of the Hollywood elite to feed the starving people fo Zimbabwe won't be far behind. Why our gov't can't have the foresight to realize that this is something much better off being nipped in the bud, but it will be left to fester until all out military force is needed. Something that will take two divisions to fix two years from now, could be easily fixed with a squad of well armed commando's today. I know it's not really THAT easy, but in this case an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

[serinde]

Well, the solution to all this is, of course, for America to send more money to Zimbabwi. After all, these poor, helpless people just can't make it on their own. And isn't it our responsibility - being so rich and all - to take care of them? /sarcasm

[TopQuark]

and sent their children to a school he built for his employees. Yet:

"I used to think the boss was a devil..." said Mr Mushambati.

Which illustrates so well one of the dicta of Machiavelli: punishment should be sever and inflcted swiftly, whereas gifts should be small and disbursed frequently. The school --- a rather large gift -- is forgotten all too quickly.

It sounds silly at first, but suppose the farmer charged tuition and then, each month, returned the money to the workers. In this case, they would have never forgotten what they recieved.

[Gritty]

As the collapse of agriculture threatens half of Zimbabwe's 13 million people with starvation, displaced farm workers and failed subsistence farmers are drifting to the towns and cities, where there is 65 per cent unemployment.

What we are once again seeing in Rhodesia Zimbabwe is the slow-motion massacre which has become the African Way Of Death (except in certain places, like Rwanda, where it reached fast-motioned rhythm). After Mugabe's solutions really take hold, that awful unemployment rate will drop quickly from 65% as helpless people by the millions die of starvation or migrate to overwhelm neighboring countries who have their own appalling Socialist/Marxist Dictator problems.

Isn't it about time for another chorus of "We Are The World!" and some touch-feely rock concerts gushing with celebs to stop all this?