So difficult to forgive

( Pictured : Dispossessed – Zimbbwean farm workers sit outside the house they say was burned down by Police )

The true tragedy of Mugabes land policies of the past decade lies in the way the Zanu (PF) leader has, without blinking an eye, callously manipulated a genuine national grievance the land question to further a personal ambition to cling to power. In a shameless pursuit of his bizarre goal to die in office Mugabe has defiled what was a glorious revolution waged by his own Zanu (PF) and the late Joshua Nkomos ZAPU party. The liberation struggle was about freedom, human rights, justice and equitable land redistribution.

The fast-track land reform programme was and is about Mugabe and the Zanu (PF) elite keeping power. And nowhere is this point better illustrated than in the way Mugabe and his party have treated black workers on farms seized from whites. We are not for mindless retribution. But anyone who has read the report of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union (GAPWUZ) on the experiences of the black commercial farm worker over the past 10 years will agree that the document could easily secure Mugabe a very long jail term. The report, excerpts of which we publish elsewhere in this paper, is a heartbreaking record of harassment, beatings and torture suffered by farm workers at the hands of the so-called war veterans.

The farm workers did not own land. Indeed the workers needed as much as the black peasants in whose name, Mugabe launched his disastrous farm redistribution campaign. The unforgivable crime of the farm worker and indeed the real crime of the white farmer in the eyes of Mugabe was their wrong political orientation. As one female farm worker narrates in the GAPWUZ report: My house at the farm was burnt down, all my belongings were gutted by fire . . . we did not do anything. We were just accused of voting for MDC, quite a number of us were beaten up at the farm, the five of us. Because of the beating I was injured around the eye area.

Commercial farms, like all areas where there was a considerable concentration of the working class, had become a powerful support base for the labour-backed MDC and therefore a threat to Mugabes hold on power. They had to be depopulated. And when you consider that before the land reform mayhem thousands of innocent villagers some say at least 20 000 people were murdered in the south-western regions of the country, again in the pursuit of unrivalled power by one man, it becomes so difficult to forgive. But we shall not be the judges. The call is for you Zimbabweans to make!