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Zimbabwe-style land grab in South Africa?

Anthony C. LoBaido | 16.09.2002 15:05

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."

"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."

Anthony C. LoBaido

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  1. Reality Check — Chimurenga
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