Zimbabwe now at war with its black farmers

Sunday Telegraph/Washington Times:

For years, Zimbabwe's white farmers have felt the wrath of President Robert Mugabe as they have been thrown off their land to make way for soldiers and ruling party cronies.
Now, longstanding black farmers have also become the focus of Mr. Mugabe's unwelcome attentions.
Lot Dube's crops of onions, tomatoes and sweet potatoes were growing nicely when soldiers marched into Insiza district, in the south of the country, set up camp and declared that all crops other than corn would be destroyed.
"They told us, 'We are taking away your fields from you,'?" said Mr Dube, 63, who has farmed 10 acres, 80 miles south of Bulawayo, since 1982.
The soldiers plowed up the vegetables, which he grew to earn cash to pay school fees for his children, and told him to plant corn.
Neighboring farmers -- some of them women -- who refused to uproot their own vegetables and fruit trees were beaten until they submitted.
That was last November.
Now Mr. Dube, and other farmers like him, have been told that they must sell most of their harvest to Zimbabwe's Grain Marketing Board, for a price yet to be determined, as part of Mr. Mugabe's drive to boost the nation's supply of the basic food.
"They want to feed the nation with maize," Mr Dube said. In fact, the government also plans to export the grain, to earn desperately needed currency to finance imports.
To make sure the country's grain silos are filled, Mr. Mugabe has ordered his soldiers to fan out across the countryside, and in Mr. Dube's district, they can be seen guarding roads and driving tractors.
"They don't know anything about farming," Mr Dube said. "They say they want to end hunger in Zimbabwe, but I think they want to take the fields for their own use."
For all the army's efforts, and despite the best rains in 20 years, even the government's own figures predict the grain harvest will be only half as large as in 2001, when the eviction of white farmers began. Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of southern Africa but has depended on food aid since 2002.

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Mugabe may be the most ignorant and dispotic ruler in the world today. He has taken his country from a bread basket to a basket case in just a few short years and seems determined to make things worse. He makes a strong case against the treaty of Wesphalia just by his continued rule. For the sake of the citizens of Zimbabwe, regime change is deperately needed. How many more people will starve to death while the world waits for this despot to die? Multilaterism is complicit in his genocide by starvation.