Barclays bankrolls Mugabe’s brutal regime

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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