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(TALKZIMBABWE) COLUMN: Zim rejection of Sadc land ruling sets precedent

COLUMN: Zim rejection of Sadc land ruling sets precedent
Lloyd Whitefield BUTLER, Jr.
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:01:00 +0000

"Zimbabwe has been and continues to be a victim of unilateral and illegal coercive measures, aimed at undermining the government through regime change which is illegal…Even though the country is well-endowed with natural resources, Zimbabweans have suffered and are suffering because of these sanctions which have negatively affected every facet of their lives," President Robert Mugabe at the UN aid summit in Qatar 11/28/08.

The Zimbabwe Guardian reported 12/01/08 that the Government of Zimbabwe has rejected Sadc Tribunal’s ruling that 78 white former commercial farmers whose properties were compulsorily acquired by Government for resettlement could keep their farms and said that the land reform programme will not be reversed.

The Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, Didymus Mutasa, said the Zimbabwean Government would disregard the judgment made last week. "They (the tribunal) are day-dreaming because we are not going to reverse the land reform exercise," he said and added that the Government would continue with planned acquisitions in line with policies set up eight years ago.

Mutasa emphasized that the remaining white-owned farms would be acquired by Government for the benefit of those black farmers who were marginalized by the white settler regime for decades. The minister said the acquisition was meant to correct decades of land injustice in Zimbabwe.

"There is nothing special about the 75 farmers and we will take more farms. It’s not discrimination against farmers, but correcting land imbalances," Didymus Mutasa said.

American Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson of America while laying the cornerstone for the United States of America, (a land where the once native Indian and Asian inhabitants where exterminated by the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish), knew the importance of securing land.

This colonial land pilfering struggle has resurrected its head in Zimbabwe. Africans, especially in southern Africa must be mindful that 98% of the native population of Indians and Asians in North and South America are gone forever; exterminated; and remembered yearly at America’s Thanksgiving Day. A day Americans eat turkey and thank the exterminated Native Americans (Indians and Asians) for giving up their land.

“White Man speaks with Fork Tongue” a silenced Native American Indian expression once thought to be a joke is alive and well in southern Africa.

Southern Africans, allow me to provide some historical precedential quotes from the colonial but strategic thinking of two US Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, however oxymoronic:

"By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice" – Thomas Jefferson: Batture Case, 1812.

"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered." — Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782.

"A strict observation of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lost the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means." – Thomas Jefferson to John Colvin, 1810.

"A first attempt to recover the right of self government may fail, so may a second, a third, etc. But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, a fifth or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation. For what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity?" – Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1823.

Have Africans and the MDC-T forgotten The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Cherokee Trail of Tears whereby Native Americans were rounded up from the East Coast and forced in a Death March a thousand miles to the then territory of Oklahoma in order to take their land and gold?

The MDC-T by their recent actions act as though they are paid surrogates for the neo-capitalist spoils system whose policy is "to the victor go the spoils".

An excerpt from the speech of US President Andrew Jackson’s First Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1829 in which he lays out his policy for relocating Indians of the east to territories west of the Mississippi River: (Check the casualness and eloquence)

"Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names.
Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity." – Andrew Jackson

Imperative statements of President Robert Mugabe on land securement:

“The West still negates our sovereignties by way of control of our resources, in the process making us mere chattels in our own lands, mere minders of its trans-national interests. In my own country and other sister states in Southern Africa, the most visible form of this control has been over land despoiled from us at the onset of British colonialism.” – President Robert Mugabe

“The British and the Americans have gone on a relentless campaign of destabilizing and vilifying my country. They have sponsored surrogate forces to challenge lawful authority in my country. They seek regime change, placing themselves in the role of the Zimbabwean people in whose collective will democracy places the right to define and change regimes.” – President Robert Mugabe

“Let these sinister governments be told here and now that Zimbabwe will not allow a regime change authored by outsiders. We do not interfere with their own systems in America and Britain. Mr. Bush and Mr. Brown have no role to play in our national affairs. They are outsiders and mischievous outsiders and should therefore keep out! The colonial sun set a long time ago; in 1980 in the case of Zimbabwe, and hence Zimbabwe will never be a colony again. Never!” –President Robert Mugabe

It is apparent that the MDC-T’s political axiom and refusal to enact an Inclusive Zimbabwe Government reflects the Latin maxim ignoramus et ignorabimus. Its meaning: "we do not know and will not know" as it relates to the reconstruction of Zimbabwe; the permanent securement of Zimbabwe land, or the ways and means of dismantling sanctions; or solving inflation and revitalizing the monetary system. They advocate, while living in upscale South Africa, and soon Botswana, Regime Change or suffer the consequences.

The MDC-T appears to be inherently unpredictable; the continuous chaotic behaviors are signs that their string of foreign attachment is being intercepted by self-inflicted incompetence. Maybe the MDC-T has to figure out how to procrastinate and avoid a power-sharing agreement with Zanu PF until after January 20, 2009 US inaugural. Hence, the circus atmosphere where MDC-T and Botswana have been successful in mesmerizing themselves with a masterful display of political sophistry and the business of being disruptive.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us that: "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity"

There are think-tanks in the institutions of casino capitalism that specialize in disruptive innovation, disruptive planning, disruptive politics, and disruptive economics. Sanctions, containment, and neo-colonialism are troublemaking viruses utilized for destabilization. Once infected, a country’s policies, legislation, and signed agreements become contaminated due to denied privileges and rights. These sanctions are specifically designed for time-delayed social and economic explosions if allowed to exist. The virus sinisterly delivers and generates a sudden release of intense feeling of anger and hatred while the hands of the contaminator go unseen.

The Voice of America reported 11/26/08 that “Tsvangirai said his MDC formation “is now committing itself to addressing the humanitarian crisis” in the country, saying that the Zimbabwean people had “mandated us to end their suffering.”

If, Zimbabwe is said to be bleeding economically, wounded financially, and dissolute socially: Why not stop the economic gash from hemorrhaging? Why not financially stitch the wound of inflation? Why not promote righteousness and nationhood?

Secondly, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai self-proclaimed new mandate and MDC formation may or can be perceived as actually excluding MDC-T from participation in an Inclusive Zimbabwe Government. A recent letter addressed to Thabo Mbeki in which Mr. Tsvangirai states the following appears bewildering: “There is a total meltdown in Zimbabwe and indeed a complete collapse of the state. Put simply, the state has lost any capacity to provide the basic amenities to the people in the form of food, education, health, transport. This situation, if left unresolved, will explode or implode and indeed such explosion or implosion will have a contagious multiplier effect in the region.”

If the abovementioned is true the present government in Zimbabwe has every constitutional right to declare a state of emergency and national security in conjunction with Presidential executive privileges.

On April 21, 2008 I wrote an article that was published in The Zimbabwe Guardian entitled “Is MDC a foreign interest media spin?” and wrote the following:

“Anyone who accepts as true that opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai has the intellectual, military, business intelligence, and diplomatic understanding to govern the “Crown Jewel of Africa,” Zimbabwe, ought to pay attention circumspectly to Presidential Candidate Tsvangirai’s words in sentence structure and or syntax…The honorable Morgan Tsvangirai’s professional credentials and/or experience should be the final determining factor on his ability to govern in wisdom.

‘Has anyone read a statement or listened to a conversation or interview that will demonstrate Presidential Candidate Tsvangirai’s ability and qualifications to understand a budget, banking, inflation, the lifting of sanctions, global economics, international mineral trade and investment, farming, and southern African strategic military intelligence?”

This writer still raises these important questions concerning Prime Minister to be Morgan Tsvangirai’s temperament.

This writer’s believes MDC-T has no intention of forming a Zimbabwe Inclusive Government. There continuous political disruptions and media attacks are designed to cause social insurrection. However, the sophistication of the Zimbabwe citizenry has frustrated their plans for civil unrest; they know and must know Zimbabwe land belongs to Zimbabwe.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death… A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them.”

Africans must command economic justice from Europe and America for the past initially and as a prerequisite.

For in the immortal words of the African American former Slave and Statesman Frederick Douglass: “Where there is no struggle there can be no progress, those who champion freedom but deprecate agitation are those who want profit without plowing the land, who want rain without thunder and lightning, who want the ocean without its mighty roar.”

Labels: LAND REFORM, SADC, SANCTIONS

posted by MrK @ 6:13 AM