Any white Zimbabwean farmer still on his land today, Oct 1st, will be classed as a trespasser on state property. This looks like the final stage of Mugabe's land grab. When it began there were more than 4,000 white farmers. Today there are just a few hundred who have hung on in the hope, presumably, of some international intervention to rescue them. But beyond Gordon Brown saying he refused to sit in the same room as Mugabe, nothing has happened. Britain in particular, is guilty of neglecting our own flesh and blood and leaving the white farmers to whatever fate the corrupt Zimbabwean president cares to mete out to them.
When I first visited the country fifteen or so years ago, the productive, well managed farms were producing enough food and other commodities to satisfy the Zimbabwean population and still have plenty left over to export. Each farm supported many black families who relied on their employer for their food, education and healthcare. Idealists might have said the workers would have been better off if they had been well paid. But this is Africa and the workers lot was certainly no worse and probably a lot better than that of people in many other developing countries from whose labours Britain benefits every day.
It all went dreadfully wrong when Mugabe encouraged his government ministers and officials to take over the white owned farms. With official backing gangs of thugs drove white families and their black workers off farms. They looted the farm houses and stole the crops and the cattle. And the ministers took over the properties.
Today, most of those farms are vitually derilict and produce nothing. That is why 4 million Zimbabweans are starving and will need vast quantities of aid over the coming winter if they are to survive it.
It is a scandalous tragedy that is worsening by the day. And I have friends caught up in it. They have lost everything. They have neither the money to stay (inflation is running at thousands of percent per year so that a loaf of bread costs a barrowload of notes) nor to leave. And Mugabe's croneys apart, most of the black population are even worse off.
But still our government sits on its hands and does nothing. If Zimbabwe had oil reserves you can bet British troops would have been in there sorting it out years ago. As it is the country can only implode with tragic circumstances for all concerned.