WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2002-08-08 Posted By: Jan
From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 8/8/2002 2:31:54 PM
White Zim Farmers choose exile or defiance
It could be any country club gathering, but there is a poignancy behind the smiles. The people posing for the photographer are unlikely to meet again: they are among 3,000 white farmers ordered by President Mugabe to leave their land by tonight. One day before President Mugabe’s eviction deadline for 2,900 white farmers, the water from the sprinklers on Gwina farm arcs through the sunlight, fattening the ears of knee-high wheat and barley. The brilliant green of the 1,200 acres of irrigated cereal on Vernon Nicolle’s fields near the small northern town of Banket is a shock to the eye after the arid 60-mile drive from Harare amid miles of dry, windblown weeds. Mr Nicolle, 58, is a third-generation Zimbabwean and was born on the farm. He is not leaving without a fight. “I’m here till it’s over,” he declares, referring to the farmers’ protracted legal battle against Mr Mugabe’s land seizures. Like three quarters of Zimbabwe’s white farmers, Mr Nicolle is the recipient of a “section 8” order under the Land Acquisition Act, which expires at midnight tonight.
Issued 90 days ago, the order is meant to empty 90 per cent of the country’s white-owned commercial farms at a stroke. Until two years ago these farms kept Zimbabweans well-nourished and saved millions in other parts of Africa from starvation. Mr Nicolle has been served with two section 8s. He had the first annulled by the High Court on June 25 because, like nearly every other such order, it was riddled with enough errors to render it useless. Last week an air force officer arrived to serve him with another. Mr Nicolle noticed that it was backdated to May 22, a month before his first order had been thrown out. “Are we in the same world?” he asked the officer. He refused to accept the order and the officer left mumbling: “I’m only doing my job.” Mr Nicolle is one of a number of white farmers who are turning Mr Mugabe’s clumsy law against the government. “They made the law, and we can beat them,” he said. “They will change the law to make it worse, and we will punch holes in it again. The only way we are going to beat the beast is by beating him in law. The day I take the law into my own hands, I become one of them.”
He is one of the commercial farmers who usually produce nearly 30 per cent of Zimbabwe’s wheat. He almost bankrupted himself in 1991 building a dam that serves 16 miles of irrigation piping on the farm. Until two years ago he grew 3,500 tonnes of soya beans, 4,000 tonnes of maize and 8,000 tonnes of wheat on the 3,950 acres of irrigated soil. This year he was allowed to use less than a third of that area. The remainder was allocated illegally to a police assistant commissioner, a chief prison officer, an air force squadron leader, a flight lieutenant and two local councillors. Without permission they used his pumps to take water from his dam to irrigate wheat planted two months too late. He cut the supply, so they switched to his boreholes, relying on his residual fertiliser already in the ground from previous crops. Despite that, the plants in their field are sickly, with that fatal dull blue that indicates lack of care and water. “By stopping me from farming, they have starved 30,000 mouths,” Mr Nicolle said. “Mugabe has caused this starvation and it’s what’s going to beat him.”
THE main road through the small town of Marondera has been filled this week with pick-up trucks laden with the possessions of white families who have abandoned their farms for a precarious future. Graham Douse joined the exodus yesterday. The 49-year-old farmer was heading with his wife and two sons to Zambia, where he plans to lease a farm near Lusaka. “I have a lot of optimism about Zambia,” he said. “The Government’s been very welcoming. I like the people. They are much more politically mature than Zimbabweans.” Mr Douse is leaving the rich red soil of his Nyagambi farm, about 75 miles east of Harare, to about ten “resettled” squatter families, who have already cut down the trees around their encampment of mud huts. He has sold his herd of 450 cattle for slaughter. The fields are bare. His equipment has been put into storage. The shade netting over his export flower unit blows redundant in the wind, and all but ten of his 125 workers have been laid off. The 270 million gallon irrigation dam that Mr Douse built in 1991 is now used only by the squatter women for drinking water and washing.
This farm was where he used to produce 180,000kg of tobacco a year, 80 tonnes of paprika, 240 tonnes of seed maize, 200 tonnes of maize and 70 head of fattened cattle. In the last growing season, despite the famine that is beginning to overwhelm Zimbabwe, he was allowed to grow a mere 22 acres of paprika on more than 2,500 acres of land. He was leaving with a feeling of almost relief, he said. “I have to earn a living. I have done no farming for a year and I am tired of stagnating and the stress has been huge.” Terror has also driven MrDouse off his land. Marondera has since February 2000 suffered some of the ugliest lawlessness wrought by President Mugabe and his militias. Before Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in March, the militias set up a base camp less than half a mile from the house. “People they suspected of being part of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change were brought from farms all over the place to be tortured,” Mrs Douse said. “The workers were beaten over and over again. Our gardener had his feet roasted over a fire. Women and children were beaten.” At the next-door farm, the militias beat a security guard to death.
All semblance of proper government has disappeared in the area. The only law is that of a former army captain called “Comrade Chiweshe”, who lives on the farm over the road. The police do not respond to calls for help. “It’s warlordism,” Mrs Douse said. “If there are any transgressions, people are brought before him. He sits as judge and jury and the youth militia are the enforcers. They beat them (suspects) up.” The Douses hope to return one day. “This can’t go on forever.”
Source:Times (UK)
Published:Thu 8-Aug-2002
Author: Jan Raath
URL: http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID…br>