Mugabe to attend U.N. general assembly

[demdave]

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is battling international isolation, has left Harare to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York, state radio has reported.
Mugabe, whose controversial re-election last year was rejected by many Western powers as fraudulent, cannot visit the United States except on U.N. business under travel sanctions imposed by Washington on key Zimbabwean officials.

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation said Mugabe had gone to New York with his foreign minister, Stan Mudenge, his wife Grace and some senior government officials.

http://asia.news.yahoo.com/030925/3/14xel.html

[Zuni]

1. he must want to eat

apparently, there isn't much food left in Zimbabwe

[underpants]

2. Here's the plan, all you soldiers go take the land from the farmers

and feel free to rape, burn, toture, and kill them.

Okay chief that's done now what?

Farm it.

Farm it? We are soldiers not farmers you idiot. We don't know the first thing about farming and we just killed all the people who did. Geez that was the plan?

Yeah.

[Character Assassin]

3. Looks like.....

[Aidoneus]

4. obviously, lazy ignorance crosses party lines

What has happened is that previously landless farmers have taken the land and begun subsistance farming--ie, food that stays in Zimbabwe--, rather than the white farmers selling cashcrops to Europe for mainly European profit. More than 200,000 previously landless blacks have received land to farm since the transfers and de-construction of the untenable colonial-era economy began.

They don't know the first thing about farming and can only kill and rape? The white farmers were "all the people who did" know? Interesting, though not something I should expect to read at a "liberal" place like this.

Where's the 6,000,000-13,000,000 that were supposed to have died from starvation by now?

[Xithras]

5. Nope, it wasn't just the whites.

One of the things Mugabe likes the press to ignore is the fact that 30% of the agribusiness in Zimbabwe had been purchased by black farmers in the ten years preceding the land grabs. When Mugabe began "nationalizing" the land, these black farmers opposed him and pointed out that, if they could get 30% in ten years, they could have a majority in another ten. Mugabe repaid their criticisms by taking THEIR land as well, naming them enemies of the state. Of course, he ALSO named the black farmworkers who RAN the white farms "enemies" as well. Why? Because they were "aiding the colonialists" and because most of them understood farming well enough to know that a single 500 acre farm is more efficient than 500 1 acre farms.

Mugabe didn't just take land from the white farmers, he also took land and marginalized nearly all of the BLACK farmers who could have made his system work. The prime agricultural land in Zimbabwe today is held by either military personnel or urban transplants who have little or no experience farming. To survive, these new landowners are selling off the very equipment they need to farm their lands...they are replacing tractors, sprinklers, and pipes with oxen and open ditches. In other words, Mugabe has pushed Zimbabwean agriculture back 100 years.

[scisyhp]

7. 30% of land owned by black farmers?

Some achievement. To put the number in prospective, the remaining
70% is owned by white minority which constitutes 0.03% of population.
That's 0.03% (4500 people). And that is not even taking into account
the quality of that land. With agriculture being the most important
part of country's economy, for how long, do you think, such appro-
priation of profits by so narrow a group could be sustained?

[Xithras]

9. No, 30% of AGRIBUSINESS, not land.

Roughly 60% of Zimbabwe is farmable land, and about 40% of that farmable land is "prime" agricultural area used by commercial farmers. Since whites owned all of the commercial farms, that put 25% of the country in white hands, and 75% in black hands. The problem, of course, was that the whites owned the BEST 25%...the remaining 75% was split between the 35% "less than optimal" farmland and the 40% scrublands used for cattle. The blacks who lived on this land primarily used it for substinence farming...barely eking enough food out of the land to survive. There were a few large scale black owned commercial farms in this area, but not nearly enough.

Mugabe's original solution was a good one: Whenever any farm went up for sale, the owner had to give the government and black farmers the first option to buy. Using this solution, the government and black farmers bought out nearly a third of the commercial farms in less than a decade. What was most important was that the transition between white and black owners was civil, and the knowledge of RUNNING the farms remained when the black field managers and workers stayed on. Food was being generated in surplus, blacks were getting wealthier, and the nation was a great example of the right and peaceful way to empower the people of a country.

Then Mugabe decided it was taking too long. He took away the remaining commercial farms of the white farmers. He took away the commercial farms that had been bought LEGALLY by black farmers. He chased off the farmworkers who knew how to plant, irrigate, and run the tractors. He split the large farms into small plots that are ONLY useful for substinence farming, that can never hope to generate enough food to feed anyone other than its owners, and then gave them to people without any farming experience. In the 1990's, black Zimbabwean's went from owning practically 0% of the large farms to owning nearly a third of them...a massive, dramatic, and impressive shift by ANY measure. In the last few years, Mugabe has pushed them back to 0% by destroying the very farms he wanted to "liberate", thereby sentencing his people to a lifetime of backbreaking work, praying that their crops don't fail causing famine. The food surpluses of Zimbabwe's history probably won't be seen again in our lifetimes.

[underpants]

10. ? Didn't Migabe make the sudden shift due to fears of a coup?

First of all my initial post about this was just the short story as I understood it, thanks to you I know a lot more.

Didn't Mugabe get scared of the soldiers and to appease them he made the sudden change? Am I remembering that right?

[Xithras]

12. Something like that

There were riots in a few cities, and Mugabe started grabbing the farms as a distration. Zimbabwe has a chronic major unemployment problem with many of it's urban citizens mired in crushing poverty. Rather than deal with that problem, Mugabe created "villains" for the people to hate, to blame their problems on, and focused their rage on those targets (he took a page out of Hitlers playbook). Today the urban blacks own the land, the "villains" have been defeated, but the Zimbabweans are still mired in poverty and unemployment...and are slowly starving as well.

Mugabe screwed his country in a desperate attempt to hold onto power. Unless he can cook up some new villains, I expect that he'll either be usurped or murdered within the next few years. Sadly, the damage to the country is already done.

[AP]

15. The numbers I recall were something like

90% of the best farm land was controlled by European commerical farmers and that something like less than 20 farms had transferred back to the government under the Westphalia Agreement (which was 20 or so years old), and all those farms were low quality farmland.

Also, the food produced in Zimabwe was almost entirely for export to European markets. Tobacco was their biggest crop, if I remember correctly, just 5 or so years ago.

I think a more accurate depiction of what was going on in Zimbabwe would be to recognize the similarities to Argentina. If you're doing what big business and Wall St wants, you get some foreign investment which creates a bubble. Big business loved those tobacco farms et c, because it they could produce at such a high profit margin, as the capital investment to acquire the land was basically a bunch of bullets, and, since you had people impoverished by having there biggest source of equity stolen -- their land -- you had cheap labor. So big business loves you. You can get some money to buy people food. But, after a little while, when you realize that you're never going to get a middle class operating like that, and the sytems starts to crumble in under the weight of its own irrationalities, you have to do what Stiglitz says is the only way to remedy persistent third-world poverty -- land reform.

[AP]

14. Where did you get this?

In all the anti-Mugabe/anti-land reform propaganda that came out last fall, I've never heard this before.

What isn't mentioned very often is that there was an agreement -- the Westphalie Agreement, I believe it was called -- by which the white land owners agreed to turn the land back over to the state according to a schedule which they repeatedly ignored. Even the transfers of last fall were delayed in courts for a long time, and the evictions happend on a very extended time scale. I wouldn't be surprised if many farmers saw the writing on the wall and sold out in advance of the foreclosures. I bet there was some legal tussling as a result (you know, like along the lines of whether they were selling title but maintaining control, or whether they could even pass title to land subject to an eviction notice, and whether buyers were aware that there'd be a question). Although all that is very predictable, given the cirucmstances, I've never seen the allegations you make in your post before.

As for your claims at the end of the post, there are two interpretations. Lots of the best farms were tobacco export farms. Naturally, if they're being broken up into smaller subsistence farms (as they did in SA and Botswanna, I believe) you're going to have a lot of machinery that isn't neccessary. The best use of that machinery would probably be to convert it to cash and use the cash for something that has more utility.

Again, I suspect there are details left out. I'm not saying you have to give me links to prove to me the truth of what you're saying. I'm just saying that this topic fascinates me (especially in the way that racism is very subtley, and often explicitly used to spin what's going on). I'd love to see your sources.

[Jack The Tab]

6. Birds of a feather...he saw Bush do it, and said "why not me?"

Mugabe - fraudulent election....Bush - fraudulent election

[FlemingsGhost]

8. Slap the cuffs on 'em.

Start sending a message to BushCo.

[LoneStarLiberal]

11. Hopefully He Will Stay For A While

Hopefully he will stay here for a nice long while...in jail.

[dudeness]

13. Yep..Mugabe would be a good start

then we work our way up the food chain..Howard..Blair and Bush