Zimbabwe coup or not?

[Arkain2K]

 

[Greoric]

another coup, I just hope this will not end up like the one in Turkey where people got run over by tanks!

Looked like the guy was trying to pull another Tiananmen square, and the tank driver called his bluff.

 

[Fluffernutter]

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

 

[Arkain2K]

Behind Mugabe’s Rapid Fall: A Firing, a Feud and a First Lady
By Norimitsu Onishi | Nov. 19, 2017​

​

HARARE, Zimbabwe — The rapid fall of Zimbabwe’s president, whose legendary guile and ruthlessness helped him outmaneuver countless adversaries over nearly four decades, probably has surprised no one more than Robert Mugabe himself.

For years, he was so confident of his safety — and his potency — that he took monthlong vacations away from Zimbabwe after Christmas, never facing any threat during his long, predictable absences. Even at 93, his tight grip on the country’s ruling party and his control over the military made his power seem impervious to question.

But in just a matter of days, Mr. Mugabe, who ruled his nation since independence in 1980, was largely stripped of his authority, even as he still clung to the presidency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/world/africa/robert-mugabe-zimbabwe.html

 

[Arkain2K]

It is fair to point out that the seizure of these farms was more palatable to their public, because it was from whites.

I think it is also fair to say that the motive was seizing land, as proven by the black farm workers being killed.

So, no black farms were seized that I am aware of, but black farm workers being killed in the siezure, shows the real motivation was opportunistic corruption, not race wars.

Some of the black folks learned the truth the hard way about the Mugabe land grabs.

Resolving Who Owns What Land Lies at Heart of Zimbabwe’s Future
By Norimitsu Onishi | Jan. 20, 2018

An abandoned homestead in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, in November. Villagers were harassed by the police for years because Grace Mugabe wanted their land.​

MAZOWE, Zimbabwe — The police first came early one morning five years ago, catching villagers by surprise as they worked in their fields. As hundreds of anti-riot police officers jumped down from their vehicles, their commander issued the villagers an order.

“He said that mother and daughter Grace Mugabe wanted this place,” recalled a village leader, Denboy Chaparadza. “So you better move away.”

The villagers understood right away: Grace Mugabe, the wife of Robert Mugabe, who was ousted from power in November after 37 years as Zimbabwe’s leader, and their daughter, Bona, coveted the villagers’ land. The Mugabes already owned property and businesses in Mazowe, about 25 miles north of Harare, the capital, and they were eager to expand.

Before the villagers could object, the police, armed with sticks and iron bars, demolished their modest houses. “Every house,” Mr. Chaparadza said. “They left us out in the open. We felt betrayed.”

Despite the destruction, most villagers refused to leave, and over the coming years, they would continue to resist in the face of growing pressure, including beatings by the police. In 2014 and 2015, the police returned, tearing down homes under construction and destroying their crops of corn, nuts and beans.

Volunteer lawyers helped delay the villagers’ eviction in the courts even as the police intensified their campaign on the ground. Starting last March, the police began coming nearly every day to harass the residents.

One reason the 146 families who lived in Mazowe felt betrayed by their leader was that they themselves had seized the land from a white farmer in 2000, under Mr. Mugabe’s fast-track land reform program. Now, they risked losing everything to his wife and daughter: 3,100 acres of prime land for farming and cattle ranching that abuts a lake and gold mines.

As Zimbabwe embarks on its post-Mugabe era, the unresolved issue of land ownership remains at the heart of the nation’s future, just as it was at the time of independence, in 1980.

Members of a family in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, whose dwelling was destroyed by the police in 2015.​

In the talks leading to independence from white-minority rule, Mr. Mugabe was pressured into an agreement that left land ownership unsettled. In what was and remains an agricultural economy, the nation’s most productive farmland was in the hands of a few thousand white settlers.

Resolving the land issue, including compensating white farmers whose properties were later seized, is critical to repairing relations with Western nations and international lenders, which have been virtually frozen for nearly a generation. The new government desperately needs Western assistance to revive the nation’s moribund economy.

Determining who owns the land is a necessary step to development and democratization in Zimbabwe. Nearly all Zimbabweans who benefited from Mr. Mugabe’s land reform policy lack titles, or legal ownership of their property — leaving them at the mercy of the politically powerful.

In his inauguration speech, President Emmerson Mnangagwa — who, with his military allies, removed Mr. Mugabe, 93, from power — said that “repossessing our land cannot be challenged or reversed.”

But Mr. Mnangagwa said that he was “committed to compensating those farmers from whom land was taken.” In addition, he said that “complex issues of land tenure will have to be addressed” so as “to ensure finality and closure to the ownership and management of this key resource.”

Government officials highlighted the case of a white Zimbabwean, Rob Smart, who was allowed to return to his farm in December. But Mr. Smart had lost his farm only six months earlier amid factional fighting inside the ruling party and regained it after Mr. Mnangagwa’s side emerged victorious, not through any policy change.

So far, the government has yet to take any concrete steps toward compensation or even to meet with representatives of the thousands of former landowners, said Ben Freeth, a leader of white Zimbabweans whose farms were seized.

Mr. Mnangagwa was indicating his support for the tentative steps taken by the Zimbabwean government in the past few years. In order to qualify for badly needed loans from international creditors like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, government officials had begun mapping the 6,000 farms that were seized after the fast-track program started in the late 1990s. The government even held workshops on the compensation of white farmers.

Loneviance Sosono, 13, in her family’s demolished house last November in Mazowe.​

Government and Western officials, however, had remained skeptical that any final decision could be taken as long as Mr. Mugabe held power.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Mnangagwa will follow through on his recent promises. As Mr. Mugabe’s longtime right-hand man, the new president is believed to have overseen the former leader’s often violent land policy.

Land also remains a tool of political control, one that Mr. Mnangagwa and other leaders of the governing ZANU-PF party have never shown a willingness to relinquish.

“The rhetoric was encouraging, but we wait to see the practice,” Moses Donsa Nkomo, a lawyer with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, who represented the villagers in Mazowe, said of Mr. Mnangagwa’s pledge. “I’m a bit skeptical. That is the system that has kept them in power until now.”

In recent years, as fighting over succession intensified inside ZANU-PF, land was used to punish and to keep people in line.

High-ranking officials expelled from the party had their land seized, or suffered repeated incursions into their properties by party youths. The threat of losing their farms led some officials to stay in ZANU-PF, instead of decamping to new opposition parties.

“The land reform program was correct, but it was not implemented correctly,” said Temba P. Mliswa, who was expelled from ZANU-PF in 2014 and is now an independent lawmaker.

Mr. Mliswa — who managed to keep his 2,000-acre farm despite party youths who invaded and destroyed his property — said the ruling party uses land to “control you.” In addition, he and many other critics have pointed out that many senior politicians and the politically connected have more than one farm, in violation of Mr. Mugabe’s land policy.

Since Mr. Mugabe’s fall from power, the raids in Mazowe have ceased, and the police no longer bar visitors from the single dirt road that leads to the property, which locals still call by its colonial name, Arnolds Farm.

But the destruction brought by the police officers — who variously told the villagers that Mrs. Mugabe and her daughter wanted to build a university named after the president on the land and to erect a memorial to him — is still visible.

The police tore down two mud-brick homes belonging to Angeline Zvirikunzeno and her adult daughter, Rutendo Maluleke.

Standing next to a pile of bricks covered by a roof of corrugated zinc, they said they had slept in the open air as they rebuilt one house — using straw and branches.

“It took us two months to rebuild because the police kept harassing us,” Ms. Maluleke said.

Some villagers were relieved that the threat from the Mugabes appeared to have passed.

“We’re 100 percent happy,” said Susan Madoka, who lost two small homes to the police this year.

Village leaders, however, were more cautious about the future.

Since seizing Arnolds Farm in 2000, the village’s families have lived as subsistence farmers. Like other Zimbabweans who were given access to land, they did not get the titles necessary to guarantee bank loans. Without these loans, they cannot buy the equipment needed to extricate themselves from subsistence farming — and their dependence on the party that has ruled Zimbabwe since independence.

Mr. Chaparadza, the village leader, said that as part of any resolution of the land issue, the new government should compensate white farmers.

“Even if they come back, that’s fine as long as they give us another place,” he said. “We won’t deny them. What we need is only some land where we can survive — and title to the land.’’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/20/world/africa/zimbabwe-land-disputes-mugabe-mnangagwa.html

 

[IDL]

edit: already posted

 

[OCGSC]

Where the Chinese at?

Where ever resources are at.

 

[AgonyandIrony]

another coup, I just hope this will not end up like the one in Turkey where people got run over by tanks!

Lol I remember watching that live. It was wild.

 

[Arkain2K]

Zimbabwe's exiled White farmers urged to return home as agricultural industry struggles
By Africa correspondent Sally Sara | 3 Feb 2018

The Zimbabwean Government's message to exiled farmers is clear. Come home.

It is offering land leases to commercial farmers in an effort to re-start the nation's agricultural industry.

Basil Nyabadza from Zimbabwe's Agricultural and Rural and Development Authority says Zimbabwean farmers in Australia should return to home soil.

"We have a lot of capital resource dotted around the world, including Australia," Mr Nyabadza said.

The Government is now offering 99-year leases to white farmers, a deal previously reserved for black Zimbabweans.

The resignation of president Robert Mugabe last November and the swearing in of his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa has delivered significant change.

Government officials now admit the campaign of farm invasions that began in 2000 was a mistake.

"Clearly, the formulas deployed then, left a lot of bad feeling. And more importantly, the intellectual property, left our borders," Mr Nyabadza said.

Thousands of white farmers were forced off the land during the invasions.

Several farmers and farm workers were killed, many others were injured.

The Zimbabwean Government promised the program would redistribute farming land to Zimbabweans in need.

But many farms were taken by politicians and members of the ZANU-PF ruling party.

Agricultural production dropped dramatically and the nation once regarded as the bread basket of Africa struggled to feed itself.

The farm invasions have continued over the last 18 years and Mr Mnangagwa was part of the government which allowed the seizures to continue.

Now farmers who lost everything are being asked to take the latest announcement in good faith.

For some former landholders, that is too much to ask. They will never return. Others are prepared to give it a try.

Mr Nyabadza says public/private partnerships are the only way forward to restore trust.

"We are now in a new dispensation. And the challenge is now, we must rebuild our economy. In so doing, we need each other. So, we are reaching out," Mr Nyabadza said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-03/zimbabwes-exiled-farmers-urged-to-return/9392322

 

[Arkain2K]

Check out the angry Zimbabwean locals immediately swarmed the white devil Rob Smart and gave him what he deserves when he returned to the farm that he was forced off at gun point by the Mugabe government:

Tears of joy as white Zimbabwean farmer returns to seized land
By Emelia Sithole-Matarise | December 21, 2017

​

RUSAPE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - The last time white Zimbabwean farmer Rob Smart left his land it was at gunpoint, forced out in June by riot police armed with tear gas and AK-47 assault rifles.

He returned on Thursday to ululations and tears of joy from former workers and their families who were also kicked out - a jubilant return and the first sign that the president who has replaced Robert Mugabe is making good on a vow to stop illegal land seizures and restore property rights.

Scores of jubilant black Zimbabweans nearly knocked the 71-year-old off his feet as he and his two children stepped out of their car and onto their land for the first time in six months.

Smart’s case was taken up by Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe’s then vice-president who heard of Smart’s violent eviction while at an investment conference in Johannesburg.

Mnangagwa became president last month following a de facto coup that ended 93-year-old Mugabe’s rule. In the latter half of his 37 years in power, Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed, especially after the seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms under the banner of post-colonial land reform.

Land ownership is one of Zimbabwe’s most sensitive political topics. Colonialists seized some of the best agricultural land and much of it remained in the hands of white farmers after independence in 1980 leaving many blacks effectively landless.

Twenty years later, Mugabe authorized the violent invasion of many white-owned farms and justified it on the grounds that it was redressing imbalances from the colonial era.

White farmers complained that well connected people used state security forces to force them off their farms, sometimes in the middle of harvesting, even after the Mugabe government indicated, some four years ago, that land seizures were over.

“We are overjoyed, over the moon. We thought we would never see this day coming,” Smart’s son, Darryn, told Reuters.

“Getting back to the farm has given not just us, but the whole community hope that it’s a new Zimbabwe, a new country.”

Rob Smart, whose father said he started the farm from “virgin bush” in 1932, expressed confidence in the new government’s pledge to protect the commercial farming sector, a mainstay of the struggling economy.

“It’s early days but so far what they (the new government) said they are going to do they are doing,” he told Reuters.

“We just hope this whole incident will give hope to other farmers, who’ve had the same situation.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...n-farmer-returns-to-seized-land-idUSKBN1EF2US

 

[Arkain2K]

 

[Arkain2K]

 

[Sketch]

"We are all hyapyy, because the community was gaining from Mr.Smart"