Murdering, raping white farmers and stealing their land didn’t work out well for them
HARARE, Zimbabwe: Dozens of people were arrested Wednesday as pro-democracy activists defied a police ban on demonstrations and took to the streets to protest growing economic hardship and repression in Zimbabwe.
The National Constitutional Assembly said many of those arrested were assaulted. It vowed to continue with the demonstrations.
“We believe that demonstrating for a new constitution is a genuine cause that cannot be blocked by a corrupt police force whose mandate is merely that of protecting a failed regime,” the movement said in a statement.
The demonstration coincided with a bleak new warning by the head of the Zimbabwe state central bank that the nation is broke and using foreign currency needed for fuel and spare parts on food.
Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono told a panel of lawmakers that many black farmers, including politicians, who resettled on former white-owned farms, were failing to produce food. Zimbabwe was once the region’s breadbasket.
“There are some people who have become professional land occupiers, vandalizing equipment and moving from one farm to another,” Gono told a parliamentary committee on Home Affairs, according to the daily Herald, a government mouthpiece.
He said his priority was to allocate hard currency for imports of corn, the staple, to avert a looming food crisis. Currency was diverted from almost every government department to buy food, he conceded.
Under President Robert Mugabe’s land reform program, at least 5,000 white-owned farms have been seized with virtually no compensation since 2000. Many are derelict.
Mugabe was on state visit to longtime ally Namibia, where hundreds of people took to the streets with signs that read “Go Mugabe Go” and “Go Home Dictator.”
“President Mugabe is a dictator who is guilty of several human rights abuses and to a certain extent war crimes,” said Phil Ya Nangoloh, the executive director of the National Society for Human Rights. “He is an international pariah. He is not welcome in Namibia.”
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Tobacco exports, tourism and mining were the nation’s main hard currency earners before the land seizures. Tobacco production this year is forecast at one-fifth of the 1999 level and food output is at one-third.
Official inflation is nearly 1,600 percent, the highest in the world. Zimbabwe is facing acute shortages of food, gasoline, medicine and other essential imports. Power and water outages occur most days.
In the past month alone, prices of many household supplies have doubled and the International Monetary Fund has forecast official inflation at 4,000 percent this year.
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