Zimbabwe Farm Eviction: No Outcry

The New Observer
February 2, 2016

The violent eviction of yet another white farmer from a farm in Zimbabwe has proceeded without a murmur of protest from any of the world’s governments—in contrast to their hysterical response to any act which can be used to condemn whites.

White farmer Rankin watches as a Zimbabwe police track carts away his furniture.

As reported in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, a white Zimbabwean farmer, Phillip Rankin, was handcuffed and dragged off his farm by police in order to make way for the farm’s new owner, one Sylvester Nyatsuro.

What makes this eviction even more striking, is that the new owner is currently living in Nottingham, England—running a medical practice specializing in weight loss procedures. Nyatsuro is also apparently a dual national—holding both British and Zimbabwean citizenship, having been resident in the UK since 2002.

At dawn last Friday, the Telegraph reported, police dug their way under the fence around the Rankin’s homestead, and banged on the side door, telling Rankin that they would force their way in if he did not open the door.

Eventually he let the police in, who proceeded to take all his furniture outside the house and loaded it onto trucks, then drove away.

As Rankin was getting into his vehicle, more police grabbed him, dragged him out, handcuffed him, and drove him to a police station nearly 60 miles from the farm.

The new owners of the farm, Nottingham, England, based doctor Sylvester Nyatsuro and his wife.

According to an October 2015 report in the NewsDay newspaper in Zimbabwe, Nyatsuro is also a close relative of President Robert Mugabe’s family. This might explain why he, as a Zimbabwean living abroad, has been allocated ownership of the farm ahead of many local blacks.

Land seizures form part of a process made legal in Zimbabwe in terms of a law titled the Gazetted Land (Consequential Provisions) Bill, first enacted by the Zimbabwean parliament in 2006.

That law allows for any land in Zimbabwe to be turned over to the state after being “gazetted” or proclaimed to be state land, and makes it a criminal offence to “occupy or to continue to occupy land without lawful authority after it has been gazetted.”

This law forms part of a long-standing effort by the Zimbabwean government to ethnically cleanse white people from that country.

Rankin had been ordered to hand over the property to the government in 2000, at the height of the land seizures launched by the Zimbabwean government which had destroyed that country’s agriculture and economy.

He has avoided being evicted until now, mainly through a combination of legal processes and sheer incompetence from the black government’s side.

Rankin and his wife with the now abandoned crop, for which they had taken out a bank loan to plant.

Rankin is just the latest of about 4,000 white farmers who have been driven from their family farms in Zimbabwe since 2000.

About 20 white farmers have been murdered and many more assaulted during the land invasions which saw around 90 percent of white-owned farms seized. There are now less than 300 white farmers left.

Some would suggest that Rankin—who started farming six years after Mugabe took power, and, like the first white farmer to be murdered in 2000, appeared to have been a supporter of the new regime in that country—has now been faced with the inevitable consequences of a policy which he endorsed and underpinned for so long.

However, the real issue at stake in Zimbabwe is the fact that a black government can enact openly anti-white racially based measures—including murder—and escape even the slightest condemnation from the US and UK governments.

This behavior is in strong contrast to their policy toward the nations of Rhodesia and South Africa when they were under white control. Although none of the former white governments enacted policies anywhere near to what Mugabe has enforced, both those nations were subjected to sanctions and often military threats.

They hypocrisy is blatant: if whites do anything to advance their interests, they are attacked and subjected to pressure, but if blacks do anything to advance their interests, no matter how racially-based, then they are either encouraged, or, at the very worst, ignored.