Nordwave Great Britain

Zimbabwean farmer Mike Campbell has been terrorized, threatened, beaten, and, this past fall, victimized by a vicious arson attack that left him homeless. His crime? Refusing a government order to abandon his mango farm, which the Campbell family purchased legally and has worked for decades.

The trailer is below. If the Academy is prudent enough to nominate it, I’d be willing to sit through what’s certain to be an excruciating and Avatar-dominated ceremony (at least until Best Documentary is announced).Source of Story

YouTube- Mugabe & The White African – Film…

“Mugabe and the White African” tells the tale of the Campbells’ heroic stand against the tyrannical Mugabe regime. Their story is chilling in print, terrifying when communicated over the medium of film. And critics have taken note. The documentary, already widely acclaimed, is rumored to be a strong candidate for the upcoming Academy Awards.



President Obama announced today that the United States will provide $73 million in aid to Zimbabwe, saying the economically-wracked nation has made progress since Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai entered a power-sharing arrangement with longtime President Robert Mugabe four months ago.

“We’ve seen progress from the prime minister,” Obama said, after meeting with Tsvangirai in the Oval Office.

The $73 million in assistance will not be going to the government but directly to services for citizens, Obama said, because “we continue to be concerned about consolidating democracy, human rights and rule of law.”

Obama renewed sanctions against Zimbabwe in March, in an effort to press Mugabe into making changes to improve human rights.

Tsvangirai’s visit to the White House came as part of his weeks-long tour of capitals in Europe and the United States to raise money to help rebuild his tattered country.

Tsvangirai became prime minister in February as part of a power-sharing deal with Mugabe, who had ruled Zimbabwe for 29 years. The arrangement was a bitter compromise struck after Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe in presidential elections last year, but the president was unwilling to cede power.

Mugabe was once hailed as a freedom fighter responsible for ushering the formerly white-run nation into black rule. But through his years as president, Mugabe has been accused of crushing his political opposition and implementing land redistribution and other policies that have triggered hyperinflation and shattered the once potent Zimbabwean economy. In recent years, the country’s health and education systems have all but crumbled.

“There was a time when Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa. And it continues to have enormous potential,” Obama said. “It has gone through a very dark and difficult period politically. The president, President Mugabe, I think I’ve made my views clear, has not acted, oftentimes, in the best interests of the Zimbabwean people and has been resistant to the kinds of democratic changes that need to take place.”

Still, Obama said, Zimbabwe’s people are in dire need of basic humanitarian assistance. “The people of Zimbabwe need very concrete things: schools that are reopened, a health-care-delivery system that can deal with issues like cholera or HIV/AIDS, an agricultural system that is able to feed its people,” Obama said.

For his part, Tsvangirai said his country is making real, if unsteady, progress. “Zimbabwe is coming out of a political conflict and economic collapse or decay, and that the new political dispensation we have crafted is an attempt to arrest this decay, but also mindful of the fact that it is a journey,” he said. “This is a transitional arrangement. We want to institute those reforms that will ensure that in 18 months time, people of Zimbabwe are given an opportunity to elect their own government.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/06/12/obama_pledges_73_million_to_zi.html?wprss=44

South Africa World Cup 2010: ANC Government does nothing to prevent black looting and murdering, Whites Africaner/Boer have to defend themselves

Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer’s wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won’t read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.

Farmers’ wives learn how to defend themselves on a farm-attack prevention course near the Zimbabwean border

Farmers’ wives learn how to defend themselves on a farm-attack prevention course near the Zimbabwean border in South Africa

Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.

‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.

It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.

‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.

‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’

Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.

‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’

Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.

‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’

Vet’s son Barend Harris (right), 13, learns to shoot

Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire.

I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.

After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.

I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.

‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’

This is Bella’s account of an attack that happened last month in South Africa, in the north-east of the country. Her home is a long way from the vineyards and beaches of Cape Town, but South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup and five of the centres for players and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will come with them are here in the north.

Preparations are in hand but this is against the backdrop of a country gripped by ultra-violence. Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totalled more than 18,000.

But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the ‘rainbow nation’ their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.

here are  no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organisations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.

Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by colour; but it says the majority of attacks in general – ie where no one necessarily dies – are against white people and that ‘there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.’

It states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 per cent and adds: ‘The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.’

I have lived and worked in Africa for 20 years, reporting from countries all across the continent. I know that the truth is very hard to find here. Stereotypes are everywhere. Blacks give no credit to successful white businesses. Whites give no credit to the black populace, refusing stubbornly to acknowledge that they themselves are physical reminders of a brutal colonial past.

What is certain is this: since the mid-Nineties, 900,000 mainly white South Africans have emigrated from South Africa – about 20 per cent of the white population – most of them due to soaring crime rates. In an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, farms have been reclaimed by unqualified workers.

http://news.ronatvan.com/2009/06/14/south-africa-world-cup-2010-anc-government-does-nothing-to-prevent-black-looting-and-murdering-white-africanerboers-have-defend-themselves/

Our common and decisive victory against domestic apartheid confirms that you, the peoples of the world, have both a responsibility and a possibility to achieve a decisive victory against global apartheid.”

South African President Thabo Mbeki in his opening speech at the recent U.N. conference on Sustainable Development

HOUT BAY, South Africa – The mantra heard in the malls, shops, churches and pubs around South Africa goes like this: “What’s happening in Zimbabwe can’t happen here.”

Unfortunately for freedom-loving South Africans, it has indeed begun, the taking by force of white-owned farmland by blacks.

When radicals representing the 6,000 squatters in Hout Bay, a sunny seaside community just outside Cape Town, stormed the Cape High Court last week, South Africa whites were not surprised. Landless blacks have been protesting their plight since the late 1940s. However, what was shocking to South Africans was the fact that these protesters were carrying Zimbabwean flags.

How did South Africa get to this point, which many fear is a Zimbabwean-style land grab?

“The squatters in Hout Bay, they have no infrastructure or jobs. Now they are being moved again this time by the ANC (ruling African National Congress). They have been there for a decade, but the number of squatters has outgrown that squatter camp’s ability to accommodate them. The fact that they are all carrying Zimbabwean flags well it’s scary,” said Mary Anne Southard, a South African hotelier based outside Hout Bay.

It is not a random phenomenon that South African blacks are taking to the streets carrying Zimbabwean flags.

During the U.N.’s recent Sustainable Development Conference held in Johannesburg, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was welcomed as a conquering hero by large South African crowds carrying Zimbabwean flags.

“Many felt it was the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organization that secretly organized Mugabe’s welcome,” South African intelligence agent Jerome Botha told WorldNetDaily.

“But then South African President Mbeki gave Mugabe twice as much time to speak at the conference as any other leader. Mugabe and Namibian leader Nujoma railed against the West, along with Venezuelans and Cuban Marxists. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was booed off the stage when he criticized Mubage’s confiscation of the white farmland in Zimbabwe. Make no mistake, Mugabe has the full support of the non-white community in South Africa, save for the million black Zimbabweans who fled to South Africa to escape Mugabe’s man-made famine. Hout Bay is the final sign that this is the beginning of the end for white South Africans,” said Botha.

“Mbeki should put down the Hout Bay rebellion before its spreads across the whole nation, but he won’t. Even South African communist leader Jeremy Cronin has protested the ZANU-ification (the ZANU-PF party is Mugabe’s platform) of the ANC. The stealing of the whites’ land in South Africa has gone slower than Zimbabwe only because Mbeki was trained in the Soviet Union, while Mugabe and Namibia’s leaders believe in a Maoist style agrarian reform system and mass extermination as carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia. Mugabe waited more than 20 years to take the white farms. In South Africa, these events will occur much quicker.”

A representative of South Africa’s white farmers told WorldNetDaily that the ANC has set a series of laws in place to allow blacks to confiscate white-owned farms.

“Basically, the new ANC laws say that any black can make a verbal claim to white-owned farmland by saying their ancestors were taken off that land by force. It is up to the white farmer to prove that he owns the land,” the representative said.

“We saw the ANC faithful chanting ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’ at a recent funeral for a top ANC leader. The Marxist intellectuals have set the ideology for killing whites and taking all they own. Now that ideology is being marketed to the black impoverished masses. The South African army and police are now a joke under ANC rule. Who can stop what is coming?”

One political voice in South Africa rising in protest is Tony Leon, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, which opposes the ANC in parliament.

Leon last week accused the ANC government of “tacit support” for Mugabe’s “lawless land-reform program.” Leon told the South African people that the ANC would “share moral responsibility for the Zimbabwe crisis. This amounts to nothing less than tacit support for the Mugabe regime’s lawless land-reform program and an implicit renunciation of each and every core principle of Nepad (the New Economic Program for African Development).”

ANC foreign affairs chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma issued a statement challenging Leon, saying that it was “too late” to change Zimbabwe’s course and that it was “time to focus on Britain’s failure to finance land distribution.”

“Mugabe has claimed that Zimbabwe’s farmers owned 75 percent of the country. In reality, they owned roughly 15 percent. Most of the white farmers purchased their farms after Mugabe took power,” Julie McKay, a spokesperson for Zimbabwean Justice for Agriculture told WND.

The Pan African Congress, a radical black Marxist group, has given the ANC an order to begin Zimbabwean-type land reform by April of 2003. However, it appears that some in South Africa aren’t willing to wait that long.

The PAC said recently that it supported the claim to all white-owned farms and assets as issued by Namibia’s Nujoma and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe. In a press release, PAC President Stanley Magoba stated, “We indeed agree with them, as we have always done, that there can be no peace for all if there is no land for all. Some apologists for slow inconsequential land distribution have used the tired argument of law and order to justify historic inequalities. It is against the law to seize the land, they claim, forgetting that apartheid was legal, and it was unlawful for Africans to exercise political power.”

Protesting ‘neo-liberal capitalism’

Spearheading the new drive for Zimbabwean-style land reform in South Africa is the so-called Landless People’s Movement. The LPM has mushroomed miraculously almost overnight into a global organization linked to radical Marxist groups from all over the world the most important being La Via Campesia, an international group of “disenfranchised” rural people.

At the recent Sustainable Development Conference in Johannesburg, the LPM marched in defiance of globalization and what they felt is the ANC’s pro-capitalist stance in regard to their domestic fiscal and economic policy.

During this march, the LPM handed out leaflets stating: “The leaders of the world tell us over and over that they are solving our problems, saving our Earth, providing us with a better life. But the system they represent, neo-liberal capitalism, continues to destroy people and the planet.”

Recently, 72 people with the LPM were arrested after they launched a separate march that led to the offices of ANC Transvaal leader Mbhazima Shilowa.

Mangaliso Khubeka, the national organizing chief of the LPM, told the South African media, “The [ANC] government is trying to destroy us, but actually they are giving us more power. If the government was doing the right thing for us we wouldn’t be with La Via Campesina. What we are striving for is land. The people in Zimbabwe are getting land by taking it.”

In 1994, the ANC promised to give 30 percent of South Africa’s land to landless blacks by 1999. The LPM is calling for a “land summit” in which a Zimbabwean-style land-reform program would be enacted by the ANC to hand over the land of white “abusive farmers.”

“Can someone please define ‘abusive’ for me?” asked the representative of white farmers.

“That word can mean almost anything. Isn’t anyone going to stand up against Mugabe and his admirers in South Africa?”

New Zealand has called for the expulsion of Zimbabwe from the British Commonwealth. Fiji has endorsed that expulsion, which was enacted last March. ANC Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad lashed out at New Zealand, saying that they “could not speak for the British Commonwealth as a whole.”

Mugabe has stated that Zimbabwe is facing a famine. However, secret aerial footage smuggled out of Zimbabwe and showed to journalists recently at a press briefing in the Transvaal showed Zimbabwe’s dams to be filled to capacity with rainwater.

Andrew Natsios, the head of USAid, issued a press briefing stating that it was “madness” for Mugabe to arrest commercial farmers “in the middle of a drought when they could grow food to save people from starvation.”

About 6 million Zimbabweans will need food aid, according to aid groups.

Where will all of this lead?

Natasha deBoer, a Cape Town-based executive with dual citizenship in both the UK and South Africa, told WorldNetDaily she is not surprised at Mugabe’s newfound popularity in South Africa.

“The whites in Cape Town live in a dream world. They have but a few years left of their fantasy of a normal life under communist black rule,” she said.

“My father was in the British SAS. Almost 25 years ago he said that Mugabe was the ‘wave of the future.’ I find it positively shocking that Tony Blair and Colin Powell would protest Mugabe’s murderous actions now this after the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department destroyed the white leadership of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and put Mugabe into power in the first place. People should be asking what the master plan is in southern Africa. It certainly doesn’t include whites.”

Adriana Stuijt, a former anti-apartheid crusader and Dutch journalist, told WorldNetDaily, “I think the first time the Afrikaner farmers start using violence to defend their land rights after the violence against them spreads because of the increasing famine creeping in from the rest of the subcontinent a huge ethnic-cleansing campaign will be launched by the more radical elements within the African community. It will be carried out with the secret approval and active backing of the ANC regime in South Africa. This will mirror the terror campaigns in Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Angola and Mozambique.”

Stuijt continued with her grim scenario: “It will target all the remaining Afrikaners who all will be described as ‘racist right-wing whites who want to overthrow the government,’ and this all will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths, a slaughter of the innocents which will however be largely covered up by the international news media for years because it will be politically incorrect to write about it. Anybody with even half a brain should actually quit the southern African continent very soon before this starts happening. I expect within the next five years.”

http://news.ronatvan.com/2009/06/12/south-africa-zimbabwe-style-anc-government-expropriatiation-of-white-owned-farms/

The Answer . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, has urged the country’s last remaining white farmers to leave the country, in a speech delivered during his 85th birthday party.
 
“Land distribution will continue. It will not stop … the few remaining white farmers should quickly vacate their farms as they have no place there,” he said at the celebration in Chinhoyi, north of the capital Harare, on Saturday.

“Let not the original owners of the farm refuse to vacate those farms,” he added.

‘Hope’ for economy

Mugabe, who has been president of Zimbabwe since 1980, admitted that his Zanu-PF party had lost March’s legislative elections.

But he said that Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Mugabe’s main political rival, must work with him to tackle Zimbabwe’s economic crisis.

“Under this arrangement I want it known, as some of you were thinking we are no longer in power, we have an inclusive government with the president at the top, followed by the two vice-presidents, then Prime Minister Tsvangirai and two deputy prime ministers,” he said.

“It’s not the work of one side. It’s the work of all. We hope we shall in this co-operative way manage to bring about some appreciable turnaround of our economy.”

Agricultural output in Zimbabwe has fallen dramatically since 2000, when Mugabe launched his policy of seizing white-owned commercial farms and turning them over to native Africans.

Most of the new beneficiaries lack both farming equipment and the expertise needed to manage the land effectively.

Severe hardship

A decade ago, Zimbabwe produced enough maize to export a surplus – now, more than half the population is estimated to need food aid.

About three million Zimbabweans – a fifth of the population – have left the country to escape economic hardship or send remittances to relatives back home.

Tsvangirai was not at Mugabe’s celebrations, despite initial reports he would attend.

The MDC leader has in recent weeks appealed to international donors for $5bn in aid and investment.

Zimbabwe’s schools, hospital and sewerage have fallen into disrepair as a result of hyperinflation.

More than 83,000 people have also been affected by a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 3,800, according to the UN.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/02/20092281921141234.html

Hundreds of British citizens are being offered a resettlement package to leave worsening economic conditions in Zimbabwe and move to Britain.

The emergency measure to fly people out of the country comes as increasing numbers of residents approach the British Embassy in Harare asking for help to leave.

Up to 1,500 elderly and infirm Britons are expected to take advantage of the British Government’s “Zimbabwe Resettlement Programme”. Letters outlining the offer of help were sent to elderly, vulnerable and infirm citizens ten days ago and have already drawn responses from people keen to take it up. One elderly person described the deal as a “lifeline”.

The offer is focused on helping the most vulnerable to leave the increasingly desperate conditions in Zimbabwe’s collapsed economy.

Britain is acutely sensitive as to how the resettlement offer will be viewed by Zimbabwe’s new unity government. It is emphasising that it is a humanitarian move driven by a collapse in the country’s infrastructure, which is hitting the elderly and sick the hardest.

John Healey, the Local Government Minister, said yesterday: “The situation in Zimbabwe continues to make it hard to access food and medical care. That’s why we are offering help to older, vulnerable British people who are unable to support themselves in Zimbabwe and want to resettle in the UK.”

Whitehall has been planning the operation for months and officials said it was a coincidence that the timing of the offer came as the new unified government took power. It will be some months yet before the first group arrives.

“We have put in place this programme, which is available to older and vulnerable British citizens and British nationals with the right of abode in Britain,” a Whitehall source told The Times.

“We do not think Zimbabwe is about to blow up and that it is time to head for the hills but life is getting tougher for the vulnerable.”

The source added that the new Zimbabwean Government, whose Cabinet met for the first time yesterday after Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change was sworn in as Prime Minister, could not be expected to put right the collapse of Zimbabwe’s infrastructure overnight.

Under the programme, which is being co-ordinated by the Communities Department, people returning from Zimbabwe will be offered housing, state benefits and support. Ministers are preparing to waive the rules on residency tests to allow people to claim housing and council tax benefit on arrival.

The programme is available to British citizens over 70 who are living in residential or nursing homes in Zimbabwe and to younger people in need of social care who live in their own homes.

They will be interviewed by British officials in Zimbabwe and will be allowed to bring spouses and partners with them.

There are an estimated 12,500 British citizens in Zimbabwe, of whom 3,000 are over 70. The Government believes that only between 500 and 1,500 will be eligible for the scheme, which will run over the next 18 months.

Under the terms of the scheme, the British taxpayer will pay for flights to Britain and a hotel stay until permanent housing can be arranged. Some of the returning Britons will be found places in nursing or care homes with the State meeting the bill if, as is likely, they cannot afford to pay.

Those who can manage on their own will go into social housing or rental accommodation with the help of housing benefit. They will be provided with furniture and other household goods as the scheme does not include funding the return of furniture. There will be no help with transporting pets to Britain.

The Britons will be eligible for state benefits, subject to a means test, and will be offered a support worker to help them settle.

The scheme, which will be means-tested to ensure that the Government does not fund the return of wealthy people, will apply only to those permanently resident in Zimbabwe for five years or more.

The means-testing will not include a person’s fixed assets, such as their house, as the Government believes that most people will find it difficult, if not impossible, to sell property in Zimbabwe’s present economic conditions.

Ministers have not ruled out chartering an aircraft to fly groups of elderly people to Britain but for now they are looking at using scheduled commercial flights.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5755667.ece