Whites Finished In Zimbabwe - Mass Exodus Beginning
From Jan Lamprecht pbs@i... 8-15-1
http://users.iafrica.com/p/pb/pbs/
Hi,
I got this e-mail which was snuck out of Zimbabwe and made it to a British
newspaper. This tells the story and shows also how Mugabe is successfully
turning it into a race war.
In Zim, the whites are finished. It goes without saying that their
destruction also means this is the end of Zimbabwe as a functioning country.
Zimbabwe's economy will collapse totally.
There are only 50,000 whites in Zim. We still have 4.2 million in South
Africa....we're far from finished.
Regards, Jan ___
The Daily Mail - London 8-12-1
Today the Mail on Sunday prints an anonymous e-mail sent by a white stuck in
the dark heart of Zimbabwe. His horrific dispatch should shame our government
- which has stood by as the country we used to govern is destroyed... ___
We marked Heroes and Ancestors Day or Gooks and Spooks Day, as we prefer to
call it - in Harare yesterday.
The city was a place of eerie calm but in the bush all hell was breaking
loose with women, children and old folks being evacuated hourly by light
aircraft.
There is a 'fin de atmosphere among white people now, a sad, bitter
resignation to the fact that our world is crumbling around us. It's like
going through a bereavement for the beloved country many of our families came
to from England 100 years ago. It's an agonising process: anger, denial,
bargaining - then maybe death.
The entire younger generation of whites know they are not wanted and have
left or are leaving. The older generation is still desperate to live out what
remains of their lives in what is left of British colonial style.
I saw a prosperous-looking elderly couple in the supermarket last week
looking at the prices of pet food. The woman said: 'I don't think we can
afford to keep the dogs any more. They are lucky. Upcountry, other pensioners
have resorted to cooking with dog food - they cannot afford proper meat.
Their fixed pensions have been almost wiped out over the past two years by an
inflation rate which must be well over 150 per cent. With their children. and
grandchildren going or gone, many have been reduced to a kind of genteel
poverty trading in their beautiful old. houses to huddle together in old-age
compounds.
The elderly are not the only vulnerable ones. A few days ago I saw a pretty
white girl of 17 touting for business at a flea-pit hotel north of the city
centre, in a minute skirt despite the cold winter wind. In a country where
one in four people is thought to have AIDS, you have to be really desperate
to become a prostitute.
There's simply no money here and certainly no security, not even in death.
Suburban street signs have been removed wholesale - we think they are being
melted down and made into coffin handles. Graves have been opened, corpses
dumped in the bush and coffins taken for resale, spruced up with the
aluminium from the signs.
The other day I was trapped in a huge traffic jam - a rush of middle-class
black people applying for white land at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Spectacles like that make even the bitter enders talk about quitting.
The government's 'indigenisation' policy makes it more and more difficult for
us to be employed instead of the millions of jobless black Zimbabweans. And
without a very good job you can't afford a ticket to get out. There used to
be a joke that if whites and middle-class blacks waited too long they would
have to sell their plush mansions just to pay for the air fare to london.
That joke is rapidly coming true as the value of the Zimbabwe dollar
depreciates weekly. It's expected to reach 500 Zim dollars to the pound
within a month, yet when the current government took over 21 years ago, one
Zim dollar was worth a £1.00
The country feels like one big departure lounge in which we carry on our
day-to-day activities while waiting for our flight. You go to a cafe but you
only talk about who's gone, who's going, and then you see someone you used to
take coffee with who's now sleeping on the pavement.
A chronically optimistic farmer friend told me recently he had always thought
the rest of Africa could learn from Zimbabwe, but the last week had changed
his mind. 'I was so naive,' he said, 'to think that 50,000 whites could
really make a difference and hold out against the tidal wave of chaos that is
engulfing the rest of this continent. An opposition party supporter he
revealed that what really depressed him was the seeming indifference of most
black Zimbabweans to what is happening to the whites.
Mobs of war veterans - the catch-all name for Mugabe thugs - and party
supporters have been surrounding farms, building road blocks and forcing
farmers to flee in what is seen as the start of campaigning for the
presidential election next year.
I watched crowds of people looting from the from the abandoned farmhouses,
taking away white families' possessions on their heads, donkey carts and on
'liberated' farm vehicles, some of which they immediately crashed. At one
farm in the Donia area I saw looters load bags of fertiliser from a
smashed-open warehouse on to a donkey cart. At another I saw beds, tables,
cupboards and other bits of furniture scattered over the lawn and thrown into
the swimming pool. I spotted caches of stolen goods in the bush around the
farms. One farmer told me many worker had been forced at gunpoint to plunder
their employers property but some loyal ones were hiding valuable stuff such
as computers, so they could return it later when law and order was restored.
The farmer said if this happened he would never miss another church service.
Despite all this, Jack Straw the UK's new Foreign Secretary has done nothing
to help the whites in what was for so many years a British colony, and which
so many of the white tribe still hold British passports.
The slaughter and robbery might seem random but it is not. There is a brutal
logic at work. The government knows if it can drive whites out of Zimbabwe
the rest of the world, and particularly the Western media, will lose interest
and then it will be able to deal with its political opposition in no
uncertain terms. If that happens, there will be a descent into poverty and
terror from which Zimbabwe, a once civilised and sophisticated nation, may
never emerge.
