I wrote rubbish about Zimbabwe…

Original Post Date: 2001-08-27  Posted By: Jan

From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 8/27/2001 11:39:36 AM
I wrote rubbish about Zimbabwe…

An e-mail of mine reached Zimbabwe and I got this indignant reply from the
Managing Director of a company up there. He wrote:-
>
> This is absolute hogwash!! When are you South Africans going to
> stop being paranoid and start being sensible about the matter. A
> good start….get your facts straight!!
>
> 1. Mugabe is not succeeding in his “race war”. He is failing
> because we are a more united country than ever and history is going
> to prove it.
>
> 2. The ‘whites’ are far from finished as the writer puts it. With
> the New Zimbabwe, all skills will be made welcome and all races
> will prosper. This will be a country built on sound democratic
> principles
> that will ensure a bright and prosperous future. Those that have
> left our borders will be encouraged to return irrespective of race.
>
> 3. Your figures on the ‘white’ population are way out.
>
> Get out of your laager and stop sensationalizing !! Get committed
> to Africa and get rewarded.
>
> Rest assured, Mugabe is on his way out and it’s time that we all
> get
> our shoulders behind the wheel and be postive instead of
> dramatizing affairs to the detriment of all of us.
>
> I would welcome any comment to get some healthy, constructive
> debate going.
>
> SIMON SPOONER
> Email: [email protected]
> Tel: 263 540604
> Cell: 091 202 319

Simon,
I find your remarks quite hilarious. I actually was born there and
grew up there. It stuns me that you can respond as you do. I am
curious as to how many whites are actually left in the country.

Its not just South Africans calling it a race war. People around the
world are actually calling it Ethnic Cleansing.

With regard to unity and all and the great and bright future of
Zimbabwe, I can only laugh. Mugabe’s beaten you all, blacks are
leaving the country, and each day people in the rest of the world
hear even more dire things. There’s 3 months supply of food left
and the only person who will bail him out is a piece of terrorist
scrap called Gaddaffi. My neighbour has a black Zimbabwean
working for him and he tells us how terrible things are. He buys
soap and food and takes it to his family in Zimbabwe! Farmers are
run off their land… and you say the future is looking bright!!!

Just last week I had lunch with a liberal pal of mine and he said
“Maybe some little bird will whisper in Mugabe’s ear that he mustn’t
stand for election next year.”

Listening to him, and listening to you, it seems to me nothing will
convince some people until somebody sticks an AK47 in your face.

I can’t understand how anyone can say Mugabe is losing because
he won last year’s election in spite of the MDC having greater
support than he did. Mugabe has not lost in 20 years but lots of
whites (and blacks too), have lost their land.

I love your remarks about “getting committed to Africa.” Now that’s
funny. Zimbabwe has been going downhill for 20 years, Mugabe
accelerates it, and you think whites should all stand in line right
behind him and support the murdering, black racist piece of rubbish
to the hilt so he can destroy the country out of spite because he’s
in danger of going down.

But hey, if you believe you’re winning, and you’re supporting the
right side, that’s great. Judging by the events of the last few days
alone, and today’s revelations in The Telegraph (UK) (about
Mugabe’s secret plan to drive whites out of the country before the
elections), I still say, as I said before, that you folks up there are
finished. John Redfern is sitting this side preparing for when people
need a place to stay when they get here.

Of course, if you are a clandestine supporter of Mugabe and you
are one of those corrupt people who is donating money to him,
then cool, I’m sure you are “committed to Africa” and I’m sure you
do indeed have a bright future there.

Regards,
Jan

> “Never give up for that is the time and place that the tide will
> turn”
>
> —–Original Message—–
> From: Jan Lamprecht [mailto:]
> Sent: 15 August 2001 10:42
> Subject: Attention: Jeff Rense & journalists…
>
> Hi,
>
> I got this e-mail which was snuck out of Zimbabwe and made it to a
> British newspaper. This tells the story and shows also how Mugabe
> is successfully turning it into a race war.
>
> In Zim, the whites are finished. It goes without saying that their
> destruction also means this is the end of Zimbabwe as a functioning
> country. Zimbabwe’s economy will collapse totally.
>
> There’s only 50,000 whites in Zim. In SA – we still have 4.2
> million…. We’re far from finished.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jan
>
> ——- Forwarded message follows ——-
> Date sent: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:36:47 -0400 (EDT)
> Daily Mail 12/8/01
>
> Today the Mail on Sunday prints an anonymous e-mail sent by a white
> stuck in the dark heart of Zimbabwe. His horrific dispatch should
> shame our government – which has stood by as the country we used to
> govern is destroyed.
> ***
>
> We marked Heroes and Ancestors Day or Gooks and Spooks Day, as we
> prefer to
> call it – in Harare yesterday.
>
> The city was a place of eerie calm but in the bush all hell was
> breaking loose with women, children and old folks being evacuated
> hourly by light aircraft.
>
> There is a ‘fin de atmosphere among white people now, a sad, bitter
> resignation to the fact that our world is crumbling around us. It’s
> like going through a bereavement for the beloved country many of
> our families came to from England 100 years ago. It’s an agonising
> process: anger, denial, bargaining – then maybe death.
>
> The entire younger generation of whites know they are not wanted
and
> have left or are leaving. The older generation is still desperate
to
> live out what remains of their lives in what is left of British
> colonial style.
>
> I saw a prosperous-looking elderly couple in the supermarket last
> week
> looking at the prices of pet food. The woman said: ‘I don’t think
we
> can afford to keep the dogs any more. They are lucky. Upcountry,
> other
> pensioners have resorted to cooking with dog food – they cannot
> afford
> proper meat.
>
> Their fixed pensions have been almost wiped out over the past two
> years by an inflation rate which must be well over 150 per cent.
> With
> their children. and grandchildren going or gone, many have been
> reduced to a kind of genteel poverty trading in their beautiful
old.
> houses to huddle together in old-age compounds.
>
> The elderly are not the only vulnerable ones. A few days ago I saw
a
> pretty white girl of 17 touting for business at a flea-pit hotel
> north
> of the city centre, in a minute skirt despite the cold winter wind.
> In
> a country where one in four people is thought to have AIDS, you
have
> to be really desperate to become a prostitute.
>
> There’s simply no money here and certainly no security, not even in
> death. Suburban street signs have been removed wholesale – we think
> they are being melted down and made into coffin handles. Graves
have
> been opened, corpses dumped in the bush and coffins taken for
> resale,
> spruced up with the aluminium from the signs.
>
> The other day I was trapped in a huge traffic jam – a rush of
> middle-class black people applying for white land at the Ministry
of
> Agriculture. Spectacles like that make even the bitter enders talk
> about quitting.
>
> The government’s ‘indigenisation’ policy makes it more and more
> difficult for us to be employed instead of the millions of jobless
> black Zimbabweans. And without a very good job you can’t afford a
> ticket to get out. There used to be a joke that if whites and
> middle-class blacks waited too long they would have to sell their
> plush mansions just to pay for the air fare to london. That joke is
> rapidly coming true as the value of the Zimbabwe dollar depreciates
> weekly. It’s expected to reach 500 Zim dollars to the pound within
a
> month, yet when the current government took over 21 years ago, one
> Zim
> dollar was worth a (194)Â(163)£1.00
> The country feels like one big departure lounge in which we carry
on
> our day-to-day activities while waiting for our flight. You go to a
> cafe but you only talk about who’s gone, who’s going, and then you
> see
> someone you used to take coffee with who’s now sleeping on the
> pavement.
>
> A chronically optimistic farmer friend told me recently he had
> always
> thought the rest of Africa could learn from Zimbabwe, but the last
> week had changed his mind. ‘I was so naive,’ he said, ‘to think
that
> 50,000 whites could really make a difference and hold out against
> the
> tidal wave of chaos that is engulfing the rest of this continent.
An
> opposition party supporter he revealed that what really depressed
> him
> was the seeming indifference of most black Zimbabweans to what is
> happening to the whites.
>
> Mobs of war veterans – the catch-all name for Mugabe thugs – and
> party
> supporters have been surrounding farms, building road blocks and
> forcing farmers to flee in what is seen as the start of campaigning
> for the presidential election next year.
>
> I watched crowds of people looting from the from the abandoned
> farmhouses, taking away white families’ possessions on their heads,
> donkey carts and on ‘liberated’ farm vehicles, some of which they
> immediately crashed. At one farm in the Donia area I saw looters
> load
> bags of fertiliser from a smashed-open warehouse on to a donkey
> cart.
>
> At another I saw beds, tables, cupboards and other bits of
furniture
> scattered over the lawn and thrown into the swimming pool. I
spotted
> caches of stolen goods in the bush around the farms. One farmer
told
>
> me many worker had been forced at gunpoint to plunder their
> employers
> property but some loyal ones were hiding valuable stuff such as
> computers, so they could return it later when law and order was
> restored. The farmer said if this happened he would never miss
> another
> church service.
>
> Despite all this, Jack Straw the UK’s new Foreign Secretary has
done
> nothing to help the whites in what was for so many years a British
> colony, and which so many of the white tribe still hold British
> passports.
>
> The slaughter and robbery might seem random but it is not. There is
> a
> brutal logic at work The government knows if it can drive whites
out
> of Zimbabwe the rest of the world, and particularly the Western
> media,
> will lose interest and then it will be able to deal with its
> political
> opposition in no uncertain terms. If that happens, there will be a
> descent into poverty and terror from which Zimbabwe, a once
> civilised
> and sophisticated nation, may never emerge.

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