A leading Zimbabwean Cabinet minister vowed at the weekend to rid the country of the ”filth” of white farmers. Didymus Mutasa, the Minister for State Security and Land Reform, said all remaining white farmers must be ”cleared out”.
About 400 white families are still farming in Zimbabwe, following the seizure by President Robert Mugabe’s government of more than 4 000 farms.
Mutasa, one of Mr Mugabe’s closest advisers, referred to Operation Murambatsvina (”Clean out the trash” in Shona) — the campaign in which the government destroyed the homes of hundreds of thousands of urban poor.
”Operation Murambatsvina should also be applied to the land reform programme to clean the commercial farms that are still in the hands of white farmers. White farmers are dirty and should be cleared out. They are similar to the filth that was in the streets before Murambatsvina,” said Mutasa, according to the state-controlled Sunday Mail newspaper.
The government also announced it had annulled more than 4 000 court challenges by farmers to the expropriation of their farms. Last week Mugabe signed a constitutional amendment taking away the farmers’ rights to legally challenge land seizures. ”All the challenges are now useless — they are all being nullified,” said the chief law officer in the attorney general’s office, Nelson Mutsonziwa.
‘Western-managed kangaroo court’
Meanwhile, Mugabe accused the United States and Britain of racism and double standards over human rights on Sunday, and said the UN housing agency should work with US storm victims, not Zimbabweans left homeless by government demolitions of slums.
Mugabe questioned why his government was criticised for demolitions that left up to an estimated 700 000 people homeless while Britain and Habitat, the Nairobi-based UN agency, remained silent about the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
”They have remained silent about the shocking circumstances of obvious state neglect surrounding the tragic Gulf coast disaster, where a whole community of mainly non-whites was deliberately abandoned to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina as sacrificial lambs,” Mugabe told the second day of the UN General Assembly’s
ministerial meeting.
Hurricane Katrina killed more than 800 people and left about 350 000 homeless.
”Where is the Zimbabwe-famous Habitat, I ask? Why should it maintain ominous silence? For here is real work of the homeless for it! This, indeed, is where it rightly belongs and not anywhere in Zimbabwe!,” Mugabe said.
He said the anomaly was part of a pattern: ”Regrettably, we have seen over the years, a deliberate tendency to create a distorted hierarchy of rights with the sole mischievous purpose of overplaying civil and political rights, while downplaying economic, social and cultural rights.
”This explains why the whole human rights agenda … has degenerated into a Western-managed kangaroo court, always looking out for ‘criminals’ among developing countries.”
Mugabe’s government has rejected Habitat efforts to help homeless victims, in a dispute about how many people need assistance and government anger over Habitat’s suggestion that it allow poorer standards of housing rather than destroy shelters.
Zimbabwe’s government destroyed slums, market stalls and at least one housing estate of brick under tile roofing in a campaign officials say is to tidy up urban areas.
”We have rejected the scandalous demand … that we lower our urban housing standards to allow for mud huts, bush latrines and pit toilets as suitable for the urban people of Zimbabwe and for Africans generally,” Mugabe said.
”Nothing could be more insulting and degrading of a people than that!”
The Zimbabwean leader faces US travel sanctions because of allegations of gross human rights abuses, including torture of opponents and theft of elections. The US Bureau for African Affairs said on Friday officials were preparing a sanctions order that would prohibit Mugabe, his government and family members from travelling to the United States. – Guardian Unlimited Â