Wikileaks Cable: Zimbabwe White farmers wanted US$20 billion compensation to end land dispute

Wikileaks Cable: Zimbabwe White farmers wanted US$20 billion compensation to end land dispute

Although legal issues exist in the recent spate of farm invasions ... the fate of remaining white farms is ultimately a political rather than a legal issue.... Having run out of options, the CFU appears to be setting down a marker in the hopes of future compensation. Prospects of this of course are dubious.

US Amb to Zim James McGhee & Trevor Gifford, Pres of CFU: Commercial Farmer's Union | Zimbabwe Insider & Wikileaks | 24 September 2012

The Commercial Farmers Union was prepared to accept a US$20 billion compensation package to end the land dispute in Zimbabwe which had rocked the country for more than a decade but Agriculture Minister Joseph Made felt that US$1.5 billion was more than enough.

According to a cable released by Wikileaks: Trevor Gifford, president of the Commercial Farmer's Union, requested a meeting with United States ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGhee on 15 April 2009, just two months after the formation of the inclusive government, to discuss a shift in strategy his organization was adopting regarding seized and threatened commercial farms in Zimbabwe.

Gifford said the CFU now wanted compensation of up to US$20 billion because his organisation felt that by making the issue compensation-based, rather than property-rights based, farmers stood a chance of taking the emotion out of the discussion and finding common ground with President Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF leaders.

New York Times: Golden Lining of Zimbabwe Farm Invasion Policy

In Zimbabwe Land Takeover, a Golden Lining

Lydia Polgreen | New York Times | Published: July 20, 2012

HARARE, Zimbabwe — When Roger Boka started his auction business in the 1990s, this city’s tobacco trading floors were hushed places, save the mellifluous patter of the auctioneer. A handful of white farmers, each selling hundreds of bales of tobacco, arrived in sport utility vehicles, checking into the city’s best hotels while waiting for their big checks to be cut.

During this year’s auction season, a very different scene unfolded underneath the cavernous roof of the Bock Tobacco Auction Floors. Each day, hundreds of farmers arrived in minibuses and on the backs of pickup trucks, many with wives and children in tow. They camped in open fields nearby and swarmed to the cacophonous floor to sell their crop. The place was lively and crowded; two women gave birth on the auction floor. The most obvious difference, though, was the color of their faces: every single one of them was black.

Faith Moyo: Life in Rhodesia was better than Zimbabwe

Life in Rhodesia was better than Zimbabwe

Faith Moyo | 21 April 2012 17:11 | ZimDiaspora

Walter Williams: 'Blacks were better off under apartheid' (02:22)

Over the past 32 years human rights situation in Zimbabwe have been blatantly violated by a black government that masquerades as a champion of peace and democracy, thus the Mugabe regime has eroded all norms of 21st century civilization.

In contrast, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian era turns out to be better than "our" black government.

Most black Zimbabweans would now prefer Ian Smith as leader to Robert Mugabe – though the human instinct of freedom remains high on the agenda. The Mugabe regime has perpetrated serious crimes against its own people – black-on-black.

For what’s the purpose of freedom when freedom kills you, when freedom denies you free speech, when freedom kills your relatives, when freedom starves you, when freedom excludes you on tribal grounds?

UPDATE: Zimbabwe policeman - Guy Taylor - is denied asylum in Britain... but Robert Mugabe torturer - Phillip Machemedze - can stay

UPDATE: Zimbabwe policeman is denied asylum in Britain... but Robert Mugabe torturer can stay

As previously reported: Guy Taylor's British great-grandfather fought for Britain in the Anglo Boer War and on the Somme before the family moved to Zimbabwe. Guy Taylor has now sought refuge in Britain, where he applied for asylum, fearing a return to Zimbabwe would leave him facing persecution, as a former policeman and member of the MDC.

Taylor's application for asylum was however dismissed by the immigration judges (he has since refiled new claims).

Taylor's case provoked fury as it occurred after the Immigration Judges decision to allow Phillip Machemedze, one of Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF torturers to stay in the UK indefinitely.

Machemedze, who joined the CIO in 1996, arrived in the UK in 2000 after he had “enough of the torture”, he told an immigration tribunal.

He admitted to smashing the jaw of an MDC activist with pliers before pulling out his tooth and stripping another naked and threatening to force him to rape his daughters if he did not give information.

He also confessed to electrocuting, slapping, beating and punching "to the point of being unconscious" a white farmer suspected of giving money to the MDC, and to "putting salt into the wounds" of a female MDC member who was imprisoned in an underground cell before being stripped naked and whipped.

Liberation by --Extermination of White Settlers-- Reconciliation: Eviction of Zimbabwe's Last White Farmers

The end of an era for Zimbabwe's last white farmers?

Despite the introduction of a power-sharing government two years ago, state-backed farm seizures have continued. Colin Freeman meets one of the last white farmers still at work in Zimbabwe.

By Colin Freeman, Chegutu, Daily Telegraph
7:00AM BST 26 Jun 2011

Driving through land his family have tended for half a century, Colin Cloete stops to inspect a harvested tobacco field, rows of green stumps sprouting from a terracotta soil.

As a seasoned professional farmer, he knows the field needs to be reploughed before pests infest the weedy growths left behind. As a tired political campaigner, however, he knows it is no longer worth his while.

"We should be replanting these fields now, but I don't know who is going to benefit from the next harvest," he says, shaking his head. "I will probably do it anyway, but I do wonder whether it's worth it."

The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith; By Ian Douglas Smith [*Amazon*]

After an 11-year struggle in which their ranks have been murdered, beaten, jailed and bankrupted, the last of Zimbabwe's white farmers are finally facing defeat in their efforts to resist President Robert Mugabe's land-grab programme.

Despite the introduction of a power-sharing government two years ago, state-backed farm seizures have continued, and earlier this month, Mr Cloete lost a final appeal at Zimbabwe's Supreme Court to keep his one remaining property.

Next Monday, he will appear before a local magistrate to answer a charge of trespass, for which the only way to avoid jail will be to pack up and start looking for a new house in Harare, an hour's drive away.

With his departure will also go the hopes of some 300 other white farmers - all that remains of a community that was once 4,000 strong - for whom similar legal challenges had offered some last chance of protection, or at least a stay of execution.

China to ZANU-PF: ‘Let them Eat Tiannamen Chop Suey?’: ‘Working for Chinese is 'hell on earth'’

“How does one say ‘Lebensraum’ in Chinese?”

What are we and they to understand as the connection between population and security? Population is a central element in nearly any concept of national security.

And in many regions the potential for conflict arising from simple overpopulation and starvation is large and growing. There is, of course, nothing simple about these problems; those who feel inclined to dismiss the seriousness of this potential should consider the question: "How does one say `Lebensraum' in Chinese?"

It should also be clear that solutions to the pressures created by population growth and movement, pressures that threaten the security of so many states, are beyond the means of any single state. Migration today can be controlled only by international agreement.
-- US Army War College: People Wars: Ruminations on Population and Security: How Does One Say 'Lebensraum' in Chinese?

Jason Moyo says Africans in Zimbabwe, including many in ZANU-PF are getting upset with how the Chinese are treating them: “Working for Chinese is 'hell on earth'”. China is building a massive new military college (wherefrom to direct its Southern Africa Colonial African Resource War) on the outskirts of Harare, which is described as “a monument to China's tightening hold on Zimbabwe.” It is also “a symbol of growing hostility from Zimbabwe's labour force towards Chinese employers. It is being built using a controversial Chinese loan and its workers have gone on strike to protest against beatings by their bosses and low pay.”

In the second article Paul Trewhala gives an interesting perspective to China's historical role in the ANC and current events. I particularly don't agree with his conclusion where he gives the ANC only two options to choose from. In my view there are far more than two options. However his his choice to narrow the ANC's options down to two, gave me the impression of a kind of 'good cop, bad cop' routine, pretending to project two opposing points of view, but in essence both cops have exactly the same goal.

I also don't think his observation and historical analysis of the ANC's motives are impartial or accurate reality, more like wishful thinking; but irrespective.

I read once that one of the most fundamental contributions the British Empire made to its colonies was the Jury system of law; imagine if the upcoming Chinese Empire colonialists would educate Africans to adopt a one-child only procreation policy? Now that would be one cultural revolution!

White Zimbabwe policeman denied asylum in Britain; but Robert Mugabe ZANU PF black torturer can stay

Zimbabwe policeman is denied asylum in Britain... but Robert Mugabe torturer can stay

By Jack Doyle, DailyMail.UK
Last updated at 10:53 PM on 5th June 2011

His British great-grandfather fought for his country in the Boer War and on the Somme before the family moved to Zimbabwe.

Now Guy Taylor has sought refuge in Britain, fearing a return to his native land would leave him facing persecution.

But despite his pleas for asylum in this country, immigration judges have dismissed his bid and he faces being deported.

The 31-year-old's case has provoked fury as it follows the decision to allow one of Robert Mugabe's former henchmen to stay in the UK indefinitely.

Phillip Machemedze was involved in 'savage acts of extreme violence', including smashing a man's jaw with pliers and then pulling out his teeth.

But last month it emerged an immigration tribunal ruled he cannot be sent back to Zimbabwe, as he fears for his human rights and could face torture.

Mr Taylor, by contrast, fears he could be deported within weeks.

He was born in Zimbabwe but his great-grandfather was Welsh and served in the Army during the First World War.

His mother's great-grandfather was born in Dublin and emigrated to South Africa at the turn of the last century.

End is Near for Zimbabwe's Last White Farmers - VOA

End Near for Zimbabwe's Last White Farmers

May 30, 2011
Peta Thornycroft | Harare, VOA News

Zimbabwean farmers attend a meeting of white commercial farmers in capital Harare (2010 file photo)

Zimbabwe's Supreme Court heard a case on behalf of three farmers who claimed the constitution excluded confiscation of their land because they bought their properties after the colonial era ended with independence in 1980.

The Supreme Court did not agree and quickly dismissed their application.

One of the farmers, Colin Cloete, a former president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union at the height of often violent land invasions seven years ago, was one of the applicants.

He, like many of his colleagues, has been arrested, harassed and appeared in court many times, to try to stay on his farm.

Like most surviving white farmers, the cost of going to court to try to fight his eviction has been unaffordable.

Looking back over the long and difficult years, Cloete, now 58, said his struggle to remain on his farm did not make economic sense.

Zim 'White African' Farmer who took Mugabe to court dies of his injuries

[Mugabe & White African] :: [Zimbabwe: White Refugees]

Farmer who took Mugabe to court dies of his injuries


07 April, 2011 02:54:00
The Zimbabwean

Mike Campbell (79), the Zimbabwean commercial farmer who made legal history when he took President Mugabe to the international court of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal in 2007 and won the case a year later, passed away at his temporary home in Harare on April 6.

Campbell never recovered from the abduction and brutal beatings meted out to him, his wife Angela and son-in-law Ben Freeth by Zanu-PF thugs late at night in a remote militia camp on June 29, 2008 just two days after the Presidential run-off election.

Eventually their captors forced them at gunpoint to sign a paper stating that they would withdraw from the SADC Tribunal court case, due to be heard in Namibia the following month. They were dumped outside the town of Kadoma from where they were rushed to hospital.

Campbell sustained severe head injuries which resulted in brain damage, broken ribs and damage to his lower limbs caused by a crude and brutal torture method known as falanga.

This involves beating the soles of the feet with iron bars, logs or cables and can result in permanent disability or death due to kidney failure. Campbell’s medical report noted that severe force had been used and that the possibility of permanent damage was likely.

A dedicated farmer and conservationist, Campbell purchased Mount Carmel farm in the Chegutu district in 1975 and spent the next 24 years paying back the loan.

The farm was transferred legally into the family’s company name in 1999 on receipt of a “certificate of no interest” from the Mugabe government which had the first purchase option on any sale.

White Refugee Pensioners in Zimbabwe Today; South Africa 2020; Europe 2050

White Refugee Pensioners in Zimbabwe Today; South Africa 2020; Europe 2050

10 February 2011
Andrea Muhrrteyn, White Refugees

A White Refugee Pensioner in Zimbabwe; supported by the Zimbabwe Pensioners Support Fund

Zimbabwe Today:
Once considered the Breadbasket of Southern Africa, today Zimbabweans face the following:

• 90% unemployment
  
• Major shortages in most consumer goods and raw materials
  
• Fuel shortages and when petrol is available, it is hugely unaffordable
  
• A cost of living that far exceeds earnings income
  
• Widespread Famine and Disease
  
• An excessively corrupt goverment
  
• Lawless Society and extensive media censorship
  
• An economy that has collapsed - all transactions are now in Rand or US$
  
• Pensioners that are destitute and without means of support

How did This Happen?:
» » [Mugabe and the White African]
» » [Why Were We So Wrong About Mugabe?]
» » [The Sixth Weapon: Ethno-Cultural Warfare]
» » [Frank Ellis on Zimbabwe & SA Farm Murders]
» » [UK Immig. Judge: Zim Farm Invasions = Genocide]
» » [White SA's & Zim's: World's Euro Coalmine Canaries]
» » [Roy Bennet 2 UK: Thanks for Our Zimbabwean ‘Democracy’!]
» » ['Life was better under White Rhodesia Gov.' - Black Zimbabweans]
» » [From Rhodesia's Kings Feast Breadbasket to Zimbabwe's Basketcase]
» » [Christiane Amanpour interviews Robert Mugabe; Re 'Reconciliation']
» » [Africa's Indiginisation -- Bread Basket to Basket Case -- Pied Piper....]

SA's Road to Zimbabwe Hell: Playing Race & Land Cards for Political Advantage

SA is at risk of retracing Zimbabwe’s bloody path

November 16 2010 at 11:45am
By Donwald Pressly, Business Report

One doesn’t know if one is living in a democracy until an election is held, the governing party changes peacefully and one goes to work the following day seamlessly.

Would a President Julius Malema tolerate losing power in 10 years time, once he had clawed his way into office?

Our ruling elite dance with the Zanu-PF regime. They share with it a liberation struggle mentality. Tolerance of a new party coming to power, especially emerging from the union movement like the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe, simply is not on the agenda.

Peter Godwin, author of The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe and also of When the Crocodile Eats the Sun, said this week that he found it inexplicable that the coverage of the carnage and the political intimidation and electoral manipulation on our doorstep was so poorly documented in the South African media.

South African journalists are the most likely to enter Zimbabwe and carry out their work unharmed – unlike other foreign media – yet for some reason, the horror has been largely ignored, apart from the attacks on white farmers.

Roy Bennett's 10 Nov Speech to UK Parliament: Thanks for Our Zimbabwean ‘Democracy’, i.e. Terror & Torture Vote Rigging Elections!

Roy Leslie Bennett (born 16 February 1957) is a Zimbabwean politician and former colonial policeman who is also a former member of the House of Assembly of Zimbabwe for the seat of Chimanimani, where he is affectionately known as Pachedu (loosely translated as "Between Us"). He is currently the Treasurer of the Movement for Democratic Change party led by Morgan Tsvangirai.

He was one of three white parliamentarians elected in the 2000 Parliamentary election, despite the constituency seeing intimidation against MDC voters by supporters of Zanu-PF. During the campaign his wife and family were physically attacked.

In 2004 Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told Bennett in Parliament that Bennett's Charleswood Estate in Chimanimani would be taken by the government and resettled. Bennett stood up and walked towards Chinamasa, shouting, "Unoda kundijairira iwewe! Unoda kuti ndiite sei? (Shona: Don't think you can get away with trying to take advantage of me! What do you want me to do?!). Bennet was sentenced to a year in prison.

On 28 June 2005, Bennett was released from Chikurubi Prison after spending eight months of his twelve-month sentence in custody. He told reporters he had been made to stand naked in front of prison guards and was then given a prison uniform covered with human excrement when he arrived in jail. He denounced prison conditions generally in a press conference after his release, saying "The inhumanity with which the prisoners are treated and their total lack of recourse to any representation or justice combined with the filth and stench of daily life is something I will never forget and I will not rest until their conditions are improved." -- Wikipedia: Roy Bennet

UK Immig. Judge refers to Zimbabwe Farm Invasions as 'racially motivated' Genocide..

Woman who took part in violent attacks on white farmers in Zimbabwe denied UK asylum

By David Gardner, Daily Mail.UK
Last updated at 7:52 PM on 16th September 2010

Land invasions: A woman who applied for UK asylum admitted she had been involved with gangs who scared white farmers off their properties in Zimbabwe (file photo)

A woman who admitted taking part in savage evictions of white farmers from their homes in Zimbabwe lost her bid for asylum after a High Court judge accused her of ‘crimes against humanity.’

Mr Justice Ouseley threw out the widowed mother-of-two’s appeal to remain in the UK after she confessed to beating up ten people during two land invasions.

The judge said the state-sponsored mob violence, which saw white famers’ land seized and shared out among President Robert Mugabe’s cronies, was akin to genocide.

‘We are satisfied that the two farm invasions were crimes against humanity,’ he said, likening the 39-year-old woman’s role to a concentration camp guard who followed Nazi orders during the Holocaust.

The woman, who cannot be named, came to Britain illegally in 2002 and did not claim asylum until six years later.

Loyal: The woman, who cannot be identified, said her actions were in support of President Robert Mugabe

Her bid for refugee status was rejected on the grounds that her own violent actions in Zimbabwe disqualified her from humanitarian protection in this country.

She admitted to being part of a gang of thugs from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party who invaded two white-owned farms intent on causing maximum terror and driving away black workers.

The woman, referred to only as ‘SK”, agreed she had beaten up to ten people whilst their homes burned, ‘inflicting enough pain to get them to run away.’

She said that on one occasion, she beat a woman so badly she thought she would die.

However, she insisted she had taken part in the raids under duress to prove her loyalty to Mugabe’s regime and she had never intended to kill anyone.

Mr Justice Ouseley, sitting at the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber said the farm invasions were ‘part of widespread, systematic attacks’ against white farmers and their black workers, carried out with the full knowledge of the regime ‘as a deliberate act of policy’.

The intention behind the ‘obviously inhumane’ invasions ‘was to cause great suffering or inflict serious physical or mental injury’ on victims and cow them into never returning to their homes or opposing the Mugabe regime, he added.

'We're going to take the land & determine the price' - Malema Report to ANCYL National General Council

For, months prior to the 2010 World Cup, this blog recommended a “No Normal Sport in TRC Hypocrisy on Steroids ZA” Boycott of the World Cup, for among other reasons: ‘Zimbabwe style farm invasions may be delayed ... but will definitely happen in SA's future’ - Lt. Gen. Mojo Matau, Former Chief of Mil. Intel., SANDF, but the majority of South Africans -- black and white -- love sport more than honest and honourable goverment, and so the result is their corrupt goverment allows them to watch and play as much sport as they wish, to keep them distracted from how the 'National Democratic Revolution' plans and dealings for the Zimbabwefication of South Africa are being implemented step by step...

‘We’ll take the land and give you nothing’

2010-08-27 11:34
City Press

Landowners who refuse amounts offered during expropriation should have their land taken away with no payment, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema has said.

“Willing seller, willing buyer is not working, (black economic empowerment) is not working,” Malema told the Mail & Guardian when asked what the league meant when it said it did not want leaders to tell the queen (of England) that economic policies would not change.

Malema said that in 10 years, a certain percentage of land should have been transferred to the majority of the population.

“It’s a simple policy. We’re going to take the land, but we’ll compensate and we’ll determine the price. We go to (Eugene) Terre’Blanche’s farm and say: for these many hectares we will give you R2 million, thank you very much.

“If you say that’s too little and you don’t want it, then we take the land and give you nothing. It’s called expropriation with compensation determined by the State.”

Without mentioning President Jacob Zuma, who travelled to the United Kingdom earlier this year and met Queen Elizabeth II, he said that when the ANCYL was formed, it was opposed to forms of struggle such as petitions, or “sending delegations to the queen”.

“Now that you are given power by the people of South Africa, you still go to the queen and behave like you don’t have power from the people.

“When you say that there will be no change in South Africa’s economic pattern, you are saying that it will remain the same as during the colonial regime.”

Farmers at War in Zimbabwe: South African Farmers Under Attack in Zimbabwe

Family appeals to SA govt over land attacks

Written by SW Radio, UK Zimbawean
Friday, 06 August 2010 12:46

Farmer at War, by Trevor Grundy & Bernard Miller [Rhodesia Min of Info] (PDF) [The Farmer at War was published in Rhodesia in 1979 while the Lancaster House talks were in process. It describes the embattled position of the farmers in 1979 and, even more relevant today, concludes that without the farms and farmers there was no future for the country. Includes photos and a Roll of Honour of Farmers and their families killed up to 1979.]

A South African family farming in Zimbabwe has made a desperate appeal to President Jacob Zuma’s government to come to their aid in their bid to fend of attempts by a senior politician to grab their farm.

Philip and Ellen Hapelt from Grasslands Farm in Somabhula have been fighting for several months to hold on to their property, which has caught the eye of parliamentarian Jabulani Mangena.

Mangena has led a campaign of harassment, vandalism and violence against the Hapelts and their workers, claiming he has an offer letter entitling him to the property. Late last year, the Hapelts were brutally beaten by a gang of thugs, in an attack the family believes was meant to drive them from their farm.

The Hapelts many years ago voluntarily gave up the majority of their land for the sake of ‘reform’, under an agreement that would allow them to remain on their homestead with a small portion of farming land. They also have two Court orders that entitle them to live on the farm without fear of invasion or persecution. But Mangena is openly disregarding the courts and has even threatened the Hapelts with more violence if they approach the courts again.

Africa's Indiginisation -- Bread Basket to Basket Case -- Pied Piper....

Is South Africa turning into Zimbabwe?, Scotland Herald

“Hardly a decade from now, Zimbabwe will be our destination, our reality,” wrote Barney Mthombothi in his column in this weekend’s Financial Mail, South Africa’s equivalent of The Economist.

From African jewel to basket case: Looking back at Mugabe's Zimbabwe, National Post

Seven years ago, after he started seizing his country's white-owned farms, the former school teacher eagerly compared himself to Adolf Hitler.

Indigenisation Law Is Second Rape of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Mail

The implosion of the Zimbabwean economy, which led to hyper-inflation and pushed millions to the brink of starvation, has been generally attributed by analysts the world over to its land grabs which turned the once powerful agricultural sector into a disaster of epic proportions.

Zimbabwe's Indigenisation Policy, and South Africa's BEE, are the same policy, Newstime

Why would anyone, except the Chinese and Arabs, invest in South Africa in those circumstances? Arabs and Chinese are classified black. And the irony is that blacks are not the indigenous populations of Southern Africa anyhow.

Is Julius taking Mugabe lessons in ‘Let them Eat Tiannamen Chop Suey?’

[]

Paul Trewhala gives an interesting perspective to China's historical role in the ANC and current events. I particularly don't agree with his conclusion where he gives the ANC only two options to choose from. In my view there are far more than two options. However his his choice to narrow the ANC's options down to two, gave me the impression of a kind of 'good cop, bad cop' routine, pretending to project two opposing points of view, but in essence both cops have exactly the same goal.

I also don't think his observation and historical analysis of the ANC's motives are impartial or accurate reality, more like wishful thinking; but irrespective.

I read once that one of the most fundamental contributions the British Empire made to its colonies was the Jury system of law; imagine if the upcoming Chinese Empire colonialists would educate Africans to adopt a one-child only procreation policy? Now that would be one cultural revolution!

Malema, China and the 'Mugabe turn'

Paul Trewhela says the ANC faces a stark choice as to which path to follow

Paul Trewhela, Politicsweb
18 April 2010

The president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, has positioned himself at the confluence of the imperial interests of China in southern Africa and those of a faction in the ANC, indicating the possibility of a new Cold War in the sub-continent.

In a speech at Colesburg in the Northern Cape on Saturday, Malema repeated previously made threats to white-owned and western property interests in South Africa and added that "if investors were to leave, the Chinese would come in. 'The Chinese will work with anybody,' he said".

This adds a sharp focus to Malema's positioning of himself as the political representative in South Africa of the regime of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, which is in debt economically, politically and militarily to China.

Black Zimbabweans say life was better under White Rhodesian Goverment...

Black Zimbabweans say life was better under White Rhodesian Goverment...

Postcard From Zimbabwe

By Nicholas D. Kristof
Published: April 7, 2010, New York Times

HWANGE, Zimbabwe: Here’s a measure of how President Robert Mugabe is destroying this once lush nation of Zimbabwe:

In a week of surreptitious reporting here (committing journalism can be a criminal offense in Zimbabwe), ordinary people said time and again that life had been better under the old, racist, white regime of what was then called Rhodesia.

“When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited,” one man, Kizita, told me in a village of mud-walled huts near this town in western Zimbabwe. “But we didn’t realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us.”

“It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come,” added a neighbor, a 58-year-old farmer named Isaac. “It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.”

Over and over, I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite. Black Zimbabweans responded that at least that regime was more competent than today’s nasty, oppressive regime run by the tiny black elite that surrounds Mr. Mugabe.

ANC planning Zimbabwe style land invasions after 2010 World Cup

ANC planning Zimbabwe style land invasions after World Cup

29 March, 2010 01:40:00
Zimbabwe Mail

HARARE - South Africa’s ruling party ANC is planning Zimbabwean style land invasions after the FIFA 2010 World Cup, amid reports Zimbabwe’s Zanu PF and War Veterans Association will provide crucial support for the programme, sources in Zimbabwe said on Monday.

Controversial African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) President, Julius Malema, is set to visit Zimbabwe for a series of meetings with Zanu PF counterparts. The crucial meeting will go a long way in exchanging ideas and preparatory stages for both logistics and mobilisation for sporadic land invations.

A member of the Zanu PF security department told our reporter that the basis of Malema’s visit to Harare is a follow up to a secret discussion between President Mugabe and his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma, three weeks ago.

The source said when South African President Jacob Zuma visited Zimbabwe during the coalition talks between Zanu PF and the MDC, he discussed at length, matters ranging from the British media’s personal attacks on his private life during the recent visit to the United Kingdom and the need to expedite South African land reform.

It is at this stage that Mugabe converted Zuma into his camp, and the two leaders agreed to join hands in actively assisting each other in the land reform and indigenisation process.

This week, a high-level delegation in the South African security forces, intelligence and media with close links to the ruling party ANC are travelling to Zimbabwe and they will spend three months training at the Zimbabwe National Army’s Staff College.

‘Zimbabwe style farm invasions may be delayed ... but will definitely happen in SA's future’ - Lt. Gen. Mojo Matau, Former Chief of SANDF Mil. Intel

Mugabe is their darling

Zim dictator regarded as hero by Africa’s upper middle classes

Aidan Hartley, The Spectator
25 October 2003

In Johannesburg recently I hooked up with Mojo, an old drinking chum from Dar es Salaam, where in the 1980s I was an FT stringer covering the ‘frontline states’ and he was an officer in the ANC’s armed wing, Mkhonto we Sizwe. These days I’m a settler on the land in Kenya, while Mojo has risen to become Lieutenant-General Mojo Matau, South Africa’s chief of military intelligence. At our reunion the beers flowed freely into the night as we remembered the old days. Mojo and I slapped each other on the back and held hands for a bit. Then I asked my friend, this man in the kitchen cabinet of ANC power in the new South Africa, what he thought of Robert Mugabe. At his reply my heart sank. He described Zimbabwe’s President as a hero for what he’s done to white farmers, and a leader who illuminated the path ahead for South Africa. I remonstrated, as I always do, and ended by telling Mojo that I saw myself as an African first, a white second, and that it was my ardent wish to stay on the continent. ‘Your only home,’ countered Mojo, gently taking my hand again, ‘is England.’