ZIMBABWE

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RE: Zimbabwe - Finished

August 02 2007 at 09:39PM
By Tonderai Kwidini

Taps in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, are running dry even though the city's main supply dams are more than 60 percent full, according to figures from the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA).

With more than half of Harare's three million inhabitants now experiencing water shortages, residents are resorting to desperate measures to find supplies.

Carrying a large bucket to work has become a daily task for Tedious Marembo, employed as a cleaner at a block of government offices in the city.

This building is never without water because it houses three government ministries. So Marembo fills his bucket at work to provide water for his wife and two children who live in Kuwadzana, a poor Harare suburb.

"My wife has to walk a long distance to get water at a church in my neighbourhood where a borehole was sunk, (and) she has to pay Z$50 000 (about R1 418,78) for a bucket. The only way I can help her cope with household chores is to carry a 20-litre bucket to bring water from my workplace," he said.

Harare has experienced intermittent water shortages for about two years, due mainly to poor management and ageing infrastructure. Water experts from a Scandinavian development agency, who preferred to remain anonymous, said ZINWA management was inadequate because the water authority was not run by professionals, but rather by political appointees.

Sanitation has gone the way of water provision, as members of the Mashapa household - also in Kuwadzana - can attest. A blocked pipe caused a fetid pool of sewage to build up around their house, and this outflow now slowly winds its way through the suburb to a nearby stream.

"We are locking children in the house. They can no longer play outside because of the danger of contracting diseases. Cholera is right in our midst," said mother Olivia Mashapa.

Primary school children who use a path alongside the Mashapa home are obliged to pick their way through waste matter, while other children play in the effluent - and are exposed to water borne diseases. At the far end of the suburb, still more residents are at risk, as they buy vegetables from vendors who sell their wares right next to open sewage. Many toilets in this area are blocked and can no longer be used.

For the fortunate few who can afford membership at the city centre gym, visits there have become a necessity - not only for exercise, but also for a shower. - Sapa-IPS

Why is it that African Blacks cannot seem to manage without Whites leading them. If another bloody liberal tells me it is education that they need I will scream in his face. These left wing liberals have been proven to be the real racists. Mugabe went to Oxford before he went to the Soviet Union so how educated have they got to be? What a crock! The people who insisted that the terrorist Mugabe and his gang take over Rhodesia in the 1970s - 80s should all be very ashamed for condemning the millions of Africans (Blacks, Indians, Mixed races and the Whites) to the misery and early deaths they are now subject to. Shame on you all. 90% of Rhodesian Blacks did not want Ian Smith to go as they were happy and had seen what had happened to other African countries when "freedom" was granted.

White farmers in court for growing crops

Christopher Thompson, Jonathan Calvert and Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas

BARCLAYS Bank is bankrolling President Robert Mugabe’s corrupt regime in Zimbabwe by providing substantial loans to cronies given land seized from white farmers.

The British bank lent £750m to the country’s new landowning elite in the first half of this year, mostly through a government scheme to boost farm productivity.

This weekend Barclays was under pressure to say whether it had lent money to five of Mugabe’s ministers — each named in European Union sanctions.

The Sunday Times has established that the five have received cash for their farms under the scheme to which Barclays is one of the main contributors.

They include Didymus Mutasa, the national security minister, who helped to orchestrate the controversial land-grab policy that left 4,000 white farmers without homes or livelihoods.

The country’s human rights abuses have made it an international pariah. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has said he will boycott the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon next month if Mugabe remains on the guest list.

Despite the worldwide condemnation, Barclays, which faced criticism for operating in South Africa during the apartheid years, has remained one of only a handful of banks with extensive operations in Zimbabwe. It has recently been opening new branches in the country.

This weekend Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP who has a long-standing interest in African affairs, said he would ask David Miliband, the foreign secretary, to investigate whether the Barclays loans had breached EU sanctions. He said: “The loans sustain the regime and individuals within the regime and those who profited from the violent land-grab. It’s morally questionable.”

Many of the farms now funded by Barclays were forcibly taken by mobs organised by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. They were distributed to leading figures in the regime, even though the policy was intended to give farms to landless black Zimbabweans. The beneficiaries included Mugabe himself, who is said to have three estates.

The land-grab policy proved a disaster for agricultural production, turning the former bread basket of Africa into a country where many people are said to be on the brink of starvation.

To increase productivity, the government is now offering loans to farmers to buy machinery and supplies under a scheme called the Agricultural Sector Productivity Enhancement Facility (Aspef).

Barclays is required to finance the loans under Aspef as part of a set of conditions laid down by the Zimbabwean government which permit it to operate in the country, where it made £34m in profit last year. Its £750m Aspef loans are an increase of 17% on the previous year.

At least five ministers have received loans through Aspef. They are Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, minister of information and publicity; Patrick Chinamasa, minister of justice; Rugare Gumbo, minister of agriculture; Webster Shamu, minister for policy implementation; and Mutasa.

Ndlovu confirmed that ministerial colleagues and other party members were seeking the Aspef cash. “Yes, my colleagues applied and they should have received the funding,” he said.

The ministers are on a list of 131 regime figures who are blacklisted as a result of EU sanctions on Zimbabwe. The sanctions say: “No funds or economic resources shall be made available, directly or indirectly, to or for the benefit of people on the list].”

Barclays refused to confirm or deny whether the ministers or other blacklisted regime figures were its customers, on the basis of client confidentiality. The bank said it closely audited its Zimbabwe operations to ensure no sanctions were breached.

However, a source close to the bank said he had seen Shamu’s paperwork for a Barclays loan. Farmers take out loans with individual banks through Aspef. Among the other institutions which offer loans is Standard Chartered, a British bank, which also refused to say whether it loaned to regime members on the basis of client confidentiality..

Yesterday Zimbabwe opposition figures called for an investigation into how the Barclays funds had been spent. “Barclays is giving money to this regime and propping it up in an opaque process,” said Tendai Biti, secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change.

He said the agricultural loans were used as a “vehicle of personal wealth accumulation for the regime”.

Barclays’ dealings in Zimbabwe have angered former farmers who lost their land. Derrick Arlett-Johnson, who fled his farm in the Midlands province, said: “They’re loaning money to people who have taken something illegally. So in fact they are assisting in a crime, in my opinion.”

A spokeswoman for Barclays said the bank had operated in Zimbabwe since 1912 and had 1,000 employees and a network of 20 branches serving 150,000 retail, business and corporate customers in the country.

“We are committed to continuing to provide a service to those customers in what is clearly a difficult operating environment. We are also committed to the welfare of our employees,” she said.

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IF THIS IS TRUE; THEN AN INTERNATIONAL BOYCOTT OF BARCLAYS BANK HAS TO BE STARTED.

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WHY MUGABE MUST BE ARRESTED NOW FOR GENOCIDE.

The following is a description of how and what happened when Mugabe was given power in Rhodesia, soon to be known as Zimbabwe, where he hired a group of North Korean army personnel to form and train his Fifth Brigade to ensure he stayed in power.

From Kenya: Gukurahundi: Film reveals horror details of the Ndebele massacre by Mugabe

Date Posted: Monday 12-Nov-2007 from www.africancrisis.co.za

[It was not an "attempted genocide". It was a REAL GENOCIDE. Kevin Woods was on the inside, in charge of the CIO. He writes about it in his book, "The Kevin Woods story". Robb Ellis was in the Zimbabwe Police force - he wrote about it in his book, "Without Honour". They were there... they saw it with their own eyes. Jan]

From The Nation (Kenya), 11 November
by: Arno Kopecky

Nairobi - On August 3, 1983, President Robert Mugabe created Zimbabwe's Fifth Brigade from soldiers drawn from the military wing of his ruling Zanu PF. The brigade was known as gukurahundi, (rain that washes away chaff), a name that was soon given to the government operation they undertook. Over the next four years, Operation Gukurahundi would terrorise members of the Ndebele community throughout southern Zimbabwe because of the perceived threat they posed to Mugabe and his predominantly Shona regime. By the time it ended, at least 20,000 people are alleged to have been killed. "It's an episode you never hear brought up in conversation," says Zenzele Ndebele, the soft-spoken 29-year-old journalist who has just released the first documentary ever made on the subject. "Twenty-seven years after independence, people are still afraid to bring it up. I'm not going to make a penny off this documentary, but if it generates some dialogue I'll be happy."

Gukurahundi: A Moment of Madness is a 25-minute investigation into what many observers have labelled an attempted genocide. Given the current climate of fear in Zimbabwe, gathering interviews from survivors was an exceptional challenge. "Everybody here knows someone who was affected by Gukurahundi," says Ndebele, who lives near where most of the atrocities were committed, in the southern city of Bulawayo. "But it was very, very hard to find anyone who would open up. Of those who agreed to talk, several changed their minds afterwards - they would call and ask me not to include them in the footage. So I had to cut the film from 45 to 25 minutes. What you see is just a fraction of what actually occurred."

That fraction seems horrifying enough. Archived footage of a young Mugabe calmly promising to "crush the dissidents, completely," is counter-posed with present-day interviews in which some of those "dissidents" who survived reveal the ordeals they were put through. One man describes scores of young men being pushed down a mine shaft; those who resisted were shot and thrown in, until the shaft filled with bodies and another had to be found. Another recounts how, as a young boy, he was ordered to set fire to the house in which soldiers had locked 30 of his family members. "Luckily," he says, "a rain storm broke out after the soldiers left, and put the fire out." It was a rare reprieve in a narrative of slaughter and denial that bears some sinister parallels to the present.

Newspaper headlines from the mid-1980s show Mugabe's government government denying any wrongdoing. "Of course when you're fighting a war, you expect people to complain of excessive force," explains a smooth-faced Mugabe, inviting his accusers to prove their allegations. Today, those same denials and calls for proof of what everyone knows to be happening are offered in response to allegations of police brutality against members of Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Gukurahundi demonstrates how the government erases its own misdeeds. One veteran journalist describes how Fifth Brigade soldiers escorted him to the site of a mass grave. "We knew the victims had been buried here," he says. "But by the time the army let us near, they had exhumed and burned the bodies. The grave was empty, and all that was left were ashes everywhere." Elsewhere, doctors' reports that documented the stab wounds and marks of torture on innocent civilians were denounced as lies; such reports were used as proof of treason against the very doctors who made them.

On December 22, 1987, the government signed the Unity Accord, which put an end to the fighting. Gukurahundi disappeared from the collective memory, replaced by a surreal peace which, at first glance, appears to reign even to this day. "If you didn't know what was going on in this country, you'd think everything was normal," says Ndebele. But his own experience attests that not far under the surface, things are anything but peaceful. For one thing, he and his cameramen had to keep the entire project under wraps while they were filming. "Whenever we drove out for an interview, we'd bring a tape of a funeral and put it into the camera," he recalls. "That way, if we were stopped at a roadblock - which happened often - and they asked us what we were doing, we would just say we were coming back from filming a funeral. The real footage we would hide elsewhere in the car."

Nevertheless, police intelligence officers got wind of what he was up to and called him in one day. "They accused me of plotting to bomb the president," Ndebele says, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. "All sorts of ridiculous accusations. But eventually they had to let me go." But the completion of the documentary did not bring an end to such hassles. To begin with, he had to sneak across the border into South Africa for the movie's debut. "There was no way we could show it in Zimbabwe," he told this writer the day before he left. "So I arranged to do it in Johannesburg. But although I sent my passport off three weeks ago for a travel visa, I still haven't gotten it back. They think all Zimbabweans want to stay permanently in South Africa - they don't realise some of us are enjoying the chaos here at home." By Ndebele's own admission, that enjoyment is about to be tested. He fully expects the police to lock him up once the movie is out in distribution. And yet, asked if he is worried about where that may lead, he shrugs. "They can't do anything to me legally," he says. "Maybe they'll beat me up. Let them. It will be good for history."

Source: ZWNEWS.Com
Posted By: Jan
AfricanCrisis Webmaster
Author of: Government by Deception

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Dutch farmers sue for US €33-million compensation in Paris court for Zimbabwe farm evictions

Date Posted: Tuesday 13-Nov-2007

AfricanCrisis.co.za

PARIS, France. Nov 13 2007 -- A handful of Zimbabwe's evicted 'white' farmers are inching towards receiving compensation from Mugabe's bankrupt administration in an international tribunal in Paris. If the court finds in favour of the farmers, the Mugabe regime's foreign assets could be seized.

And another 50 former farmers, citizens of Switzerland, Germany and Denmark, countries which all had bilateral treaties with Zimbabwe, are also preparing to go to the tribunal.

Five years after their homes and livelihoods were stolen by Mugabe's cronies, a group of 10 Dutch citizens who farmed in Zimbabwe and considered it home, have presented their case for compensation to the tribunal.

Lands minister Didymus Mutasa, who even today, still continues to seize some of the few hundred remaining white-owned farms, mostly for his relatives or associates from his home province, Manicaland, appeared in the Paris court.

-- There is an European Union visa ban on him and all senior members of the ruling Zanu PF -- however this ban was lifted specifically for Mutasa to give evidence at the tribunal in Paris 10 days ago. Strangely, the hearings were closed to the media and the public.

More than 4,000 ethnic-European farmers and hundreds-of-thousands of their gainfully-employed live-in workers lost their only homes and incomes and jobs during the land seizures. They began in 2000.

The 10 Dutch/Zimbabwean farmers took their case to the Washington-based International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, calling for Mugabe to accept liability for breaches of a bilateral investment treaty with the Netherlands.

Mutasa, testifying for the Mugabe-regime, admitted in court that the treaty had been breached.

The court is expected to present its rulings and the amount of compensation the farmers should receive before March next year.

Sources within the farmers' group say the total amount claimed by the 10 farmers was about €25 to €33-million (about R242- to R320-million).

FOREIGN ASSETS WILL BE SEIZED

If Mugabe's administration -- which is unable to raise enough foreign currency to import food and electricity -- fails to pay compensation decided by the tribunal, the farmers would have the right to seize any Zimbabwean government property outside the country. This would include loans from the World Bank and export earnings.

And Zimbabwe would not be eligible for any funding from the World Bank or International Monetary Fund until the debt was paid.

Another 50 former farmers, citizens of Switzerland, Germany and Denmark, countries which all had bilateral treaties with Zimbabwe, are also preparing to go to the tribunal.

Zimbabwe has ducked and dived over signing treaties with South Africa and the United Kingdom. However, some South African farmers went to Zimbabwe to invest in agriculture and bought farms the government DID NOT WANT under the Zimbabwe Investment Act, which should have protected them from the loss of their property.

Zimbabwe ignored this obligation.

Most of the nearly 11-million hectares seized by the government from these commmercial farmers since 2000 now are lying idle and the homesteads have fallen into disrepair. No food is being produced there at all -- and any 'white' farmers who dare to raise crops in Zimbabwe are arrested and dragged into law courts.
Source URL: http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4126593

Posted By: Adriana

NOW THIS MUST HAPPEN IN THE UK, etc.

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AND AS ZIMBABWE PREPARES FOR ANOTHER ELECTION:

With respect to www.africancrisis.org.za

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Monday, August 25, 2008

Paradise Lost (FOR EVERYBODY THERE)

Last year, Justine Shaw was forced to flee her beloved Zimbabwe. Like millions of others, she had suffered years of threats, poverty and intimidation at the hands of Robert Mugabe's men. Here, she recounts how paradise turned to poverty – and her fears for her elderly parents she left behind.

Justine's grim story also offers a glimpse of what White South Africans can expect in the next five to eight years...

Thursday, 21 August 2008

Black Power Farm is now used as a headquarters for the war veterans in the area

The cursor hovers over the "send and receive" icon and I hesitate before pressing enter. I haven't heard from my parents for a week. Although I know the telephone line had been faulty, I desperately hope that it has been fixed – however temporarily – simply so they can reassure me they're OK.

I have three new emails. The first informs that I have enough FlyBuys points to purchase free electronic products online. It has been 19 months since my husband, two children and I settled in Australia, and yet, I'm still amazed by the giveaways, promotions, sales and bonus offers.

The second email is deleted immediately. It's advising me to resend it to seven friends within 10 minutes or be cursed with years of hardship. It's already disappeared, but suddenly I feel superstitious. I'm a Zimbabwean. For years I've binned emails like this. Perhaps all my fellow countrymen did the same? It certainly seems that nothing but misfortune and bad luck have shrouded our beautiful country for more than a decade.

The third message is the one I've been waiting for. I'm relieved and happy, eager to hear my parents' news. I still retain a desperate longing to keep up to date with the dismal state of affairs unfolding at home. The recent flawed election process has once again propelled Zimbabwe into the news and my appetite for information about the situation is insatiable.

My parents, left in the capital, Harare, form part of a population subjected to unabated, deplorable actions sanctioned by their government. In five months' time, I can initiate an application for a visa that will hopefully give them the opportunity to begin a new life with us here in Australia. Whenever I hear from them, left behind there, I feel a terrible sense of guilt, and find myself wondering.... Could I have made a difference had I stayed?

I can't help but feel I have let them – and Zimbabwe – down, choosing to slip through the gap in the fence and run away from the chaos.

When I look at my children, Karly-Emma and Kieran, now seven and six respectively, I see how they have grown in just 19 months. How different they are from the shy, apprehensive, withdrawn immigrants that arrived in Australia. They have become outgoing, confident characters, focused on the business of growing up without being ground down by the transference of our worries, fears, insecurities and stresses. We took them away because we were fortunate enough to be able to move. We took them away because we wanted them to have a normal life, one where their father didn't carry a gun and they weren't afraid of walking out of the front gate.

We have started life again. However, I cannot let go. I am constantly revisiting the place, a cauldron of 33 years' worth of memories – delightful, happy, exhilarating times and ones that still seem so unbelievably tragic that it often seems surreal that I was once a part of them. A piece of me remains in Zimbabwe with my parents. A piece is still trying to comprehend how they lost their farm four years ago and how we lived through and recovered from an armed robbery five years ago.

I regularly ponder how it became possible for one man and his handful of ruthless, greedy colleagues to so carefully orchestrate such devastation and reduce a once thriving country to a desperate, starving nation crying out for salvation.

Of course, we are the fortunate ones to have the choice of starting again. So many thousands have no option but to remain in the country and I can only admire their resilience, their determination and their will to survive this continuing holocaust of suppression, food deprivation and brutality.

I turn back to the email, typed by my unshaven, unwashed father and my mother who is "hanging on with very shredded fingernails".

When they left the farm in 2004 – a household run on borehole water, with ageing power cables and serviced by an erratic party telephone line, 40 kilometres away from the nearest town, they should have been leaving erratic services behind. Their suburban rental in Harare should, by all accounts, have had more efficient services; council water, reliable electricity and a telephone line not shared by neighbouring farms. I continue to read their news.

They have only had municipal water once in two months, and that was only for 12 hours. During this time, they managed to top up the swimming pool – water from which they use for filling up the toilets and doing the laundry. Buckets of cold water are carried from the pool into the shower to wash. It is like a black comedy and I manage a small smile as my mother describes herself "bottoms up and bent over a bucket" in the shower, dousing herself with cold, chlorinated water in an effort to keep herself clean.

They have a quarter of a loaf of frozen bread which they've preserved in the freezer by running the generator for an hour each day. My mother is an artist, but she's now been forced to supplement their income (to cover rent and the spiralling cost of living) by teaching. After work, she begins her search – scouting from shop to shop looking for grossly expensive commodities to ensure they have food for the week. Supermarket shelves are generally empty and street vendors haunt the pavements, selling anything from eggs to cooking oil at extortionate prices that increase daily. Most of their groceries are sourced from various "contacts" that have various "contacts".

Image: Taken near Chinhoyi, the sign reads "No Go Area / No Whites"

The power cuts are frequent, haphazard and unannounced, so they are unable to plan activities around them. They cannot run the generator for too long as there is still the ever present prospect of fuel shortages. Their rent has just gone up 6,250 per cent.

They spend days queuing at banks and building societies with scores of other Zimbabweans, resigned to hours of idleness as they wait to withdraw vast sums of money that will only enable them to buy a loaf of bread or a tin of baked beans. There is an automatic 50 per cent price increase if you pay by cheque, simply because this is the amount the currency will have devalued by the time the cheque is cleared.

My mother has just become used to performing mathematics in the trillions and will now have to reprogram her arithmetic. To date, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has dropped 13 zeroes off the currency, although this does little to lift my parents' spirits. They sign off the email with assurances that they are coping, that they are safe and send much love to their grandchildren.

I stare at the screen and glance across the words, trying to convince myself that the most important thing is that they are fine and that as long as they can battle on until the end of the year, when they will qualify for a migrating parent visa, they have more than many other Zimbabweans can hope for. However, I find myself banging my fists on the computer table with tears in my eyes, screaming, "It isn't fair."

My parents have lost almost everything and instead of arriving at a point where their lifetime of hard work rewards them with adequate pensions, a home of their own and long afternoons of reflection, they are confronted with the overwhelming necessity of starting again.

They are not alone.

The commercial farm invasions continue, intensifying during the election period, in spite of the increasing need for productive agricultural areas to feed a starving nation. While the President, Robert Mugabe, cradles his well-fed belly, he offers little comfort to the nation, reminding us in speeches and interviews that like most of the problems faced by Zimbabwe, hunger is a result of actions sanctioned by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Bush.

Zanu-PF and the ruling elite set the stage for a guaranteed victory when they held the elections earlier this year. Re-education camps were set up to brainwash, beat and coerce people to remain loyal to the dictatorship. Food aid organisations were banned from operating, accused of gathering support for the opposition. Suspected opposition supporters paid the price in life and limb simply for exercising their democratic right to vote. The voices that cried out for change were heard, but only for an instant and then quickly silenced. The results of the elections were ignored and Zanu-PF remains in power, as though there had never been a vote. Terrified Zimbabwean refugees fled across the borders and, in South Africa, found themselves in another hostile environment where they were subjected to horrific xenophobic attacks and blamed for rising unemployment and escalating crime.

Image: First Zim, next South Africa. Graffiti on a wall in Mafeking, North Western province of South Africa, circa 2008

Four months later, the talks on power-sharing between Zanu-PF and the opposition MDC have failed to produce a deal. Mugabe has snubbed the world and lords over a crippled nation. The democratic right of the people has been ignored. However, as the impasse drags on, nothing improves for ordinary Zimbabweans and they continue enduring a miserable existence where scavenging for food is the hot topic each and every day. And I can't help but feel guilty.

Perhaps my guilt comes from the fact that we could escape while so many others are sentenced to see things through until the end, and I am powerless to help them. I didn't run away or pack it all in for an extraordinary adventure in a new country. We did what had to be done for our children and I will always cherish the memories and the amazing, unpredictable place I used to call home.

For a while, I had it all. My earliest childhood recollections are a fusion of vague recollections. I was born in colonial Rhodesia and had the geographical privilege of growing up as the country made the transition to independence – as the African nation of Zimbabwe.

My parents played a large part in preparing us for a multiracial inevitability and ensured that we held no biases with regards to race or colour.

We confidently became Zimbabweans and, in spite of the sudden exodus of many white countrymen who predicted doom and degradation of the black ruling party, chose to remain.

My parents purchased a farm, and were committed to a future in a racially tolerant community. After independence, laws stipulated that when farms were made available for sale, they first had to be offered to the government for resettlement or redistribution to the indigenous people. My parents received the required "certificate of no current interest" from the government and embarked on a three-year project of constructing their home, a place in which they imagined they would grow old.

My childhood was an exhilarating period of adventure, experience, lessons and an eager anticipation for a future unknown. I was given the opportunity to dive into whichever activity I deemed imperative to my advancement and drifted through the years, driven by the common aspirations of becoming a princess, an actress or a prima ballerina. I was blessed with storybook parents who made me believe that anything was possible and loved me unconditionally.

My only sibling and younger brother was a friend, accomplice and constant playmate. Together, we tackled life growing up on a farm, playing cowboys on real horses, rearing orphaned calves and climbing lichen-encrusted kopjes. We swam in dams, took annual bilharzia ( a blood borne disease caught in some slow moving waters) medication and spent our childhood with freckles dancing across our cheeks like small flecks of sunlight.

School inspired, challenged and facilitated the cementing of lasting friendships. It was where I met my future husband, Ross. I was impatient to grow up and become independent, imagining a future of motherhood and homemaking.

However, after a less than a decade of silencing the sceptics, Mugabe and Zanu-PF could no longer disguise the evidence of corruption, embezzling of the country's wealth and constant bleeding of taxpayers' money to feed rapidly swelling personal coffers. Instead of reviewing their mistakes and making proactive decisions in response to the trade unions' riots against rising costs, unemployment and inflation, they diverted the nation's attention by resurrecting promises of returning land to the peasants and embarked upon a destructive course of governance, authorising war veterans to invade white-owned farms and claim them as their own. Soon, Zimbabwe's land seizures made headline news.

I married Ross, and, at the age of 30, I was the mother of two young children. With the responsibility of parenthood came the realisation that Zimbabwe was no longer the country I'd grown up in and that my children would never have the same carefree childhood that I had been so privileged to enjoy. Daily chores had become insurmountable challenges.

My parents relocated into the city, worn down by uncompromising vagrants, threats, blackmail and the sad evacuation of so many neighbours. But in spite of everything, we all clung to the belief that things would be resolved and that the atrocities would have to cease. However, the carnage of the land invasions spilled over into the city. Unemployment spiralled, accelerating residential armed robberies, hijackings and muggings.

In January 2003, armed robbers attacked my family, threatened my children's lives and violated our home and our sanctuary. Suddenly, I could no longer focus on better times to come. I was constantly afraid and found my ability to perform as a mother, wife and Zimbabwean were compromised horribly by fear and loss of hope. I became numb. We were content to go to bed each day knowing that our finances were still adequate, our children were safe and our large wall, alarm system and electrified fence would protect us from any intruders. We ploughed through each day, resigned to the uncontrolled political anarchy, trying to ignore the racism, the inflation, and escalating crime. We received our regular bills for irregular water and electricity.

And we watched as the nightmare "Operation Murambatsvina" (Drive Out Filth) was skillfully executed by the government and military. Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans were left homeless as their humble dwellings were burnt or bulldozed to the ground.

With every new tragedy and every new incomprehensible act of dictatorship we became more and more grateful that we had food on our table, a roof over our heads and a routine to follow each day. I no longer expected anything or hoped for more. Once I refused to entertain bribery. Now we were forced to establish various "contacts" to ensure that passports and vehicle licences were issued.

Finally, we were forced to sit down and take a long, hard, critical look at our lives. The preceding four years had been a vacuum, a regimented sequence of parenting, feeding and protecting an existence that became more desperate with each passing month.

My father always says the hardest part is to make the decision and we made the decision. It made me smile, laugh and explode with uncontrollable tears. I was inspired and devastated. Inspired to begin again and devastated to be leaving my home, my country and my parents.

Life is a constant process of moving forward and leaving behind. Most of the time, this progression goes largely unnoticed amongst the routines and daily commitments. Occasionally, we find we have to take a giant stride in order to move forward. We took our great leap in January 2007 when we packed up our lives and emigrated to Australia.

Now I sit here with a cupboard full of groceries, a deep freeze stocked with meat and a fridge packed with yoghurt and eggs. I am only just starting to regard them as "groceries" and not luxury items. I am only mildly concerned about the world fuel price increases, secretly grateful that I can fill up my vehicle without having to purchase fuel on the black market. I and my family are becoming part of a society that functions, where there are prospects for the hard-working as opposed to the corrupt and connected. I have learnt not to be astounded by the things thrown away during bulk refuse collection days and no longer want to stop and pick up every abandoned television. I am slowly becoming an Australian, but I am humbled by where we have come from and will never take for granted the opportunities that lie ahead.

The Zimbabwean exodus continues and we are a halfway house for family and friends who all hope to have their immigration applications approved. We watch as they walk down the same paths, come to the same conclusions and make the same decisions that we made 19 months ago. Mugabe has crippled Zimbabwe, reducing most of its people to beggars or barterers and black-marketeers. The ultimate irony is that, whether by accident or design, It has taken 28 years for them to prove the so called “racist detractors” correct when they prophesied that the incoming Zanu-PF government would be incapable of governing the country.

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Hey Mr Kissinger... Ian Smith warned you...

White farmers in court for growing crops

Barclays bankrolls Mugabe’s brutal regime

From Kenya: Gukurahundi: Film reveals horror details of the Ndebele massacre by Mugabe

Dutch farmers sue for US €33-million compensation in Paris court for Zimbabwe farm evictions

Monday, August 25, 2008

Paradise Lost (FOR EVERYBODY THERE)