- JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
-- Since March 2006, the Zimbabwean military has taken control of food
production by small-scale farmers in parts of southern Zimbabwe -- and
forcing these farmers into slavery, a human rights group headed by church
leaders have warned this week. Food prices have risen by 9,200% (ninethousand-
two-hundred percent) in Zimbabwe since January this year.
-
- LINK TO SLAVERY REPORT: http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/reports/
operation_taguta.pdf
-
- LINK to VIDEO: 'A Criminal State": http:// www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/index.php?page=play_video&id=9&type=high
-
- The Solidarity Peace Trust which visited the area this
week, warns that under the guise of "Operation Taguta Sisuthi - (Operation
Eat Well',) launched last year by Mugabe's regime to 'help revive the
agriculture sector', the Zimbabwean army has hijacked farm plots and
entire maize harvests in the southern province of Matabeleland, leaving
tens of thousands of black smallholder-farm families with no income nor
any food at all -- because the soldiers also destroyed their vegetables
and fruit trees. There are also widespread reports that Mugabe's soldiers
are raping local women and girls on a massive scale.
-
- "The fact that the Zimbabwe military have taken
away the farmers' food, which is rightfully theirs - produced by their
hard labour - is a hugely immoral issue," commented Bishop Rubin
Phillip, the Anglican Bishop of KwaZulu-Natal in neighbouring South Africa.
-
- Phillip chairs the trust, along with Pius Ncube, the
Archbishop of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Phillip and Bishop Kevin Dowling of
Rustenburg in South Africa, who visited Matabeleland last week to investigate
the impact of the deployment of the army on rural communities, released
a report on their findings at a press conference in Johannesburg. The
trust also released a videorecording of interviews with some of the affected
subsistence- farmers.
-
- "Slave-labourers Pol-Pot style"
-
- "Plot-holders perceive that they are being treated
as indentured (slave) labour, with no rights and no claim over the produce
they have laboured all summer to produce," the report commented.
The soldiers, insisting that only maize could be grown on the plots,
have destroyed vegetable gardens and fruits trees that supplemented the
incomes and diet of small-scale farmers during the lean season,"Dowling
said. "This destruction has turned plot-holders into (starving)
paupers overnight."
-
- Soldiers with very limited knowledge of agriculture had
also spent more than a month 'tilling the land for the farmers', which
has delayed maize planting, the church leaders alleged. In some cases,
the farmers were unable to make use of the good rains this year - "the
best in 20 years" - and had failed to plant at all, Dowling said.
One of the farmers in the video recording said the soldiers had threatened
to beat him if he refused to obey them.
-
- Phillip said they had also received complaints of solders
sexually abusing schoolgirls in the villages. "The presence of soldiers
... has disrupted the social fabric and left people angry and afraid,"
the report noted.
-
- http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=16910
|
