- 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.
|
