To quote the great political thinker Anna Nicole Smith, “Ah don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout nuthin’. Ah’m keepin’ mah mouth shet.” But I was interested in the Dopers’ input and thoughts on what is going on in Zimbabwe—note the article below, from today’s L.A. Times:
HARARE, Zimbabwe – Police have arrested more than 80 white farmers in the last week and charged some in court for defying government orders to vacate land targeted for redistribution to landless blacks, a farm group said Saturday. It also said police and war veterans had assaulted a white farmer during his arrest Saturday, a month after he left his farm in compliance with a government eviction notice. The government of President Robert Mugabe has ordered 2,900 of Zimbabwe’s remaining 4,500 white commercial farmers to give up their land without compensation, but nearly two-thirds are refusing to go after ignoring an Aug. 8 deadline.
Mugabe, who has been in power since the country gained independence from Britain in 1980, says his land drive is aimed at correcting colonial injustice that left 70% of the best farmland in the hands of a few thousand white farmers.
Zimbabwe has been in crisis since pro-government militants led by veterans of the 1970s liberation war began invading white-owned farms in early 2000.
Nearly half the population is short of food because of disruption on the farms and a drought affecting much of southern Africa. On Saturday, the 11 Pacific members of the Commonwealth called for stronger action against Zimbabwe but stopped short of threatening to expel the country.
Well, there’s an atrocious bit of reporting by the L.A. Times. The seized land in the main is not being targeted for redistribution to “landless blacks,” but instead to Mugabe’s cronies.
There are black landowners who are competitive with the white farmers who are not being evicted, albeit they’re in a minority. He perceives the current situation as neo-colonialism, whereas some of it is post-colonialism and the rest is just a regular imbalanced capitalist agrarian situation.
Nobody appears to be in any doubt that land reform must take place, and many of the white farmers are in agreement. However, what Mugabe is doing is not reform, it is theft. The beneficiaries have no farming expertise, and the farms that have been taken over are going to waste.
The number arrested is up to about 150 as of this morning.
I’ve followed this issue with interest, and mounting despair, over the past two years. My former SO is a Zimbabwean citizen; I have made made two lengthy visits there from 1996 on, and became good friends with most of her family; two of her uncles (Peter and Rod) are farmers there and run cattle on several plots southwest of Gweru.
Yes that’s what he says, but in fact, the white farmers have basically been made scapegoats in the ongoing conflict between Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the government’s repeated failures to implement land reform in an orderly fashion.
A couple of points to note:
A considerable amount of this 70% was actually purchased by whites after independence, with the tacit approval of the ZANU-PF government. For example, my ex-SO’s uncle Rod purchased land in Zimbabwe and moved up there from South Africa in the early '90’s.
The media repeatedly refer only to the 4,000 or so white farmers who are being displaced. Almost forgotten in this conflict are some 300,000 farm employees, nearly all non-white, who if anything have suffered even more at the hands of the occupying “war veterans”.
Not that anyone seems to care very much, but a number of Zimbabwe’s private game parks (and thus a significant amount of Southern Africa’s remaining wild habitat) are included in the land being seized. Various reports I’ve read indicate that the wildlife on them is being slaughtered for food and the land converted to subsistence farming (most often cattle grazing or crude plots of maize). IMO, this is one more brick in the road to early extinction for the black rhino, to use just one example.
I don’t think anyone who knows the situation could say that there is anything fair or just about the chaotic land “redistribution” process there, and Mugabe’s claim that it somehow redresses colonial injustices is a flat-out lie.
Bottom line is, whatever the argument for redistribution (and the dispossessed farmers, through the Commercial Farmer’s Union, have repeatedly stated their acceptance of an orderly land reform scheme), Mugabe’s lawless policy of letting the “war veterans” do his dirty work has pretty much destroyed what is left of the country’s economy.
Well, I guess if the Interior Minister, for example, is black, and doesn’t own any land, he is a “landless black,” but I don’t think seizing farmland and giving it to him advances social justice.
Following up on El_Kabong’s post, a few things;
The land seizures started as the MDC became a serious force and threatened to win elections (Mugabe dealt with that by fixing the elections). By and large, the white farmers were supporters of and financial contributors to the MDC. The black employees were also largely MDC supporters. The whole land grab is effectively to cut the legs out from under the MDC;
There actually was a successful land distribution program going on before the seizures started. Great Britain, as the former colonial power, was funding the program, so it wasn’t costing the Zimbabwean government a penny. Of course, Great Britain insisted that the program not be corrupt and that the land be distributed to people who actually needed it and would use it - i.e., not Mugabe’s cronies - and also that the farmers would be compensated for their land. This program didn’t suit Mugabe’s needs; people not beholden to him got the land, and the farmers still had money to support MDC. So he turned to seizures.
a detail which seems to be rearely mentioned in the press (and hence im having difficulty finding evidence to back up the claim)is that theoretically only white farmers with more than one farm are having land taken away from them and are being left with one farm.
but as ever this is proving only to be a theory as there are many reports of farmers with only one farm having their land forcefully removed from them, ironically only when these incidents are reported by the press is the initial detail mentioned.
in the end it doesnt change the apparent reality that has being detailed above in others posts. an unfortunate situation indeed.
I get the impression Zimbabwe’s land redistribution plan is being driven by racism, cronyism and thuggery. Mugabe seems a despicable creature.
Land reform is a legitimate concern, if it is handled with some respect for due process. Even the US has seen examples of post-colonial land redistribution. The Hawaiian redistribution scheme reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff.
Land Reform is indeed a legitimate concern, but one that has been ignored by ZANU-PF for the last 20 years while support for them has been strong. Now that there is at last a viable and legitimate opposition (that should have won both the recent parlimentary and presidential elections), Mugabe is blowing the land reform trumpet and using it both as a stick to beat those who oppose him and as a carrot to reward those who support him. (Good grief- a mixed metaphor that PW Botha himself would have been proud of )
The sooner he is deposed, the better, both for Zimbabwe and for Southern Africa as a whole - the question is: How to do it?
More likely he’s an opportunist schmuck who will use a horrible racist history to get his hands on as much of the country as he can, till he figures out how to get the rest away from his felow blacks.
As stated earlier, 1st-world news reports tend to give this impression, but they frankly have not done a very good job of reporting the numerous (some fatal) attacks by ZANU-PF thugs on black farm workers suspected of supporting the MDC.
To expand a bit on other comments, it’s my understanding that Mugabe has never particularly trusted the remaining white minority, and apparently feels their growing support for the MDC is proof that they never really accepted his rule and are thus traitors (an updated version of “L’etat, ce moi”). Many older white farmers are former members of the Rhodesian Army or anti-“terrorist” paramilitary groups who fought against ZANU-PF during the civil war years, and the resulting tensions apparently have remained just below the surface during the entire period since independence.
This is not to excuse any of ZANU-PF’s many crimes, but there is a context to this struggle which tends to be left out of news reports.
I may be too emotionally connected for this debate, since the father of a childhood friend was recently murdered in Zimbabwe, but I’ll weigh in nonetheless. Dr. Tom Raub was a retired physician from West Virginia who dreamed his entire adult life of retiring in Africa, and he realized that dream by buying into a Zimbabwe game ranch and moving there with his wife a few years ago. He was murdered in an apparent carjacking last month. Thankfully, Mary Raub was back in the States at the time.
Of course, if it was a simple carjacking (details are still unreliable) it could have happened here in the U.S., not that remarkable. Dr. Raub was not a farmer, so I’m not even clear on whether his land was up for grabs, but this much seems crystal to me: Mugabe has created a climate where any white landowner’s life has become cheap to the point of irrelevance.
I hesitate to broach this point, but what would the public reaction be if the races were reversed in this case?
We saw that already, in Apartheid-era South Africa. The governmental transition was reasonably peaceful, though the nation is choked with other, more massive problems, including gross corruption, AIDS and appaling rape statistics.
If you’re talking about a reverse example in which a white majority would oppress minority populations using thugs and lowlifes as enforcers, Krystallnacht comes to mind, as well as certain venues in the southern United States who were reasonably tolerant of Klan activity. War and/or social change was required to break the link between the government and the thugs. Mugabe’s removal from office will almost certainly be necessary to eliminate the threat of the so-called “war veterans”, a title I am unwilling to grant such lowlife scum without adding quotation marks.
But contrary to Eker’s thought, I doubt it’d be much different, though there may be more media attention. A lot has happened since Jim Crow and Krystallnacht.
There would be a huge public outcry. The UN would get involved. There would be much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts from the lefties. Jesse, Al, and Louis would be on the first flight to Zimbabwe, and would be raising hell until they got there. Nobody would be spouting off about land reform, that’s for sure.
Krystallnacht and Jim Crow: as inapposite as is humanly possible perhaps?
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