DECEMBER 2008

Your verified, online Newsletter for Rhodesians & Zimbabweans Worldwide.

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THE MISSING PERSONS BUREAU

I am posting this request on behalf of a Member who is currently experiencing difficulties with computer related problems. Our Member has recently had a bereavement and upon sorting papers out etc, as one does on the loss of a loved one, came across a South African ID Book now she wishes to return the said book to its rightful owner so herewith the details:- KAREN DALGLIESH BORN IN ZIMBABWE ID No 550223 0731 085 Should any Members know the above lady please kindly contact Neats on rhodiechat@shaw.ca so that we can relay the information onto the Member concerned

I am still hoping someone might know where Jenny Phillips (nee Bruss) and Rose Webb (nee Coutts) (ex Roosevelt GHS ) are? Thanks Margaret
Member: MargaretL
Real Name: Margaret and John Larkin

Surely someone out there must know the whereabouts of the Pargeters or Faithfuls. The Pargeters lived in Queensdale - they are Diane, Jessica and Carol. The Faithfuls lived in Umtali. Christopher (Kit) Faithful and his family.
Member: AnnFairs
Real Name: Ann Fairs nee Flatman

Looking for Paul Patterson (married to an English nurse, Judy). Last saw Paul in London in 1979. He was working as an accountant. Heard that they had moved to the Isle of Wight.
Member: terrymck54
Real Name: Terry McKeown

Looking for Wayne Van Blerk.  I went to Gifford High with Wayne, the group was Myself (Stan Wilson), Claude Andre' , Jeff Mee , Keith Savin, Glen Norton, Mark Champion. I am in contact with Claude, Keith and Mark. Jeff I know is in Aus, but Wayne I last saw when he left for Cape Town. He used to work for the Post Office and Sanders Dept. store. His dad Vince? worked for the breweries.
Member: Beamish
Real Name: Spa Wilson

Whereabouts of Connie and Pam Heyns. Were our best man and brides maid and used to live in Harare (growing roses) and then went into the ministry. Heard they had moved to Bulawayo area but lost contact altogether. Daughters Lisa and Julie. Desperate to make contact or know of their whereabouts PLEASE! Thanks
Member: Kloppie
Real Name: Liz Kloppers

Please is there anyone out there who could furnish me of any detail of Tom and Audrey Stewart ex Mashava, they have three children Grant (daughters name not known) and James the youngest son. Lost touch when I left for England in 2000. Tom had a sister in Triangle her name Agnes Gaylard who worked at Triangle Primary School
Member: twentybourne
Real Name: Maureen Odendaal

Peter Newbery sister Elaine Newbery looking for Nella Bresler now known as Nella Cox lost contact when they left Fopogena Farm, Chegutu would love to be back in touch really sad when lost contact so very sorry to hear about Joe saw it in the newspapers here in the u.k.
Member: peter.newbery
Real Name: Peter Newbery

Looking for Alan and Pat Muir. Last seen Bulawayo. Tony and Pam De Araujo
Member: tony.de
Real Name: Antonio De Araujo

Looking for Gavin Ford and John Stander, Gavin Ford is ex Umtali.. Last heard he was some where in Vic falls area
Member: Liz.Handyside
Real Name: Liz and Rob Handyside

Hi Everyone - I am still looking for my ex husband Jose (we called him Ze).
My daughter Tonisha (whom he adored) was his only child and has been trying to locate him for the last couple of years with no luck. She last saw her father when she was about 5 yrs old. She is 23 now.
He could be in Portugal, Zims, anywhere. I have a family home address in Porto but need a contact to ask the family there questions as to his whereabouts
Member: QT41325
Real Name: Rosalind Goosen

Looking for JOSE FRANCISCO MELO DE SA::: Anyone knowing his where about please contact me, as his daughter is desperate to find him. She has not seen him in 19 years. They were in Bulawayo , came to S.Africa in 1988.
Member: marcia
Real Name: Marcia Schillaci

Am looking for sisters Sandra and Denise Fox who attended the Arts Education School in Tring Herts, England during the 1950s. Their parents lived in Bulawayo so they lived with us here in Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, during the school holidays. Denise, the elder sister may have gone on to Sadlers Wells ballet school
Member: DGrayFisk
Real Name: Delphine Gray-Fisk

I am desperately looking for my daughter who was born in Gweru (Gwelo) on the 26 December 1973. I have been looking for the past 3 years but will NEVER give up. If anyone knows any bit of information please can you get hold of me via Rhodiechat. My former name was Heather Mary Black. Please
Member: heatherhartley
Real Name: Heather Black

This is the last Rhodiechat Newsletter to be sent out in this format.  All future ones will be sent through the Rhodesian Was Super Mailing List on Yahoo. Sign up today to receive the Rhodiechat Newsletter in future:

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Hi There looking for John Tweedie ex Umtali . Costa Mutzuris ex Fort Victoria High School
Member: Ped.Mike
Real Name: Mike Pedersen

Looking for anyone who remembers me Pam Chadwick(Lewis) from school or the church or even where I worked at Swift Transport. Would love to hear from you even if we only knew each other briefly.
Member: plewis
Real Name: Pam Lewis

I am looking for William Francis Craig on behalf of his sister Jeanette.  Jeanette lives in Harare and has lost touch with William. William has a brother Mike in Torquay and another sister Linda in Australia. You can contact me Marion Southwick.
Thank you
Member: Marion
Real Name: Marion Southwick

I would like to contact any members of the 1980 Olympic Women's Hockey team. Especially Sonia Robertson.
Member: barbarac28
Real Name: Barbara Cohen

Calling Rhodesian Force members, family and those interested A new Rhodesian Security Forces website is being built and we need your input. This is also an information platform to other Rhodesian Security Forces site and is NOT being built in conflict. Those with related websites may add your info in the Groups links which will be added to the new site. All Security Forces members, family and those with interest are welcome. Join our mailing list/group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/therhodesianforces

Looking for Bill Black was a Fynn sailor from Mazoe Sailing Club. Last we heard in '84, he was moving to Australia. Member: Bron
Real Name: Bron Grey

Hi I am looking for info on my brother Christopher Hunt. He had a kid with Kelly in Zim and the boys name was Stephen. Anyone have any info please let me know as I would like to hook up again.
Member: mallyzam
Real Name: Melanie Hunt

Would love to get in touch with Karl & Helen Jaques ( Brother & sister) Mom is Brenda & Dad Colin Jaques. The last time I saw Colin Jaques was in 1986 in the U.K. He used to do the discos at Bellevue Club in Bulawayo around 1978, 1979 & 1980. Those were the days. Tthey were great. So PLEASE!!!!! get in touch. Or if you know where about they are please. Member: harare24
Real Name: Tina hughes

Does anyone know the whereabouts of Peggy & Joe Le Roux ex Bulawayo. Joe worked as a driver for the Rhodesia Railways and spent some time in Choma, Zambia, before relocating to Bulawayo. Joe and Peggy had 2 sons - Gary and Michael.
Member: ChristineR
Real Name: Christine Rossouw

Looking for Brown-Denise and Moira. Looking to make contact with you. We were kids at Headlands/Macheke in the 50's.
Member: tyefu
Real Name: Stretch Merrington

Message for Barbara Tipler (now Cullinan). Kate Benyon is looking for you and asked me to help. Reply to me and I will forward the info to Kate.
School: Vainona High School, Harare
Year: 1988
Barbara has a brother, Richard and a sister Claire. Her dad worked for a company called Astra I think. She now lives in Australia, with her husband Rory. Her best friend at school was a girl called LeeAnne.
Member: Mayflymad
Real Name: Helen James

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To all those who responded to the appeal put out by Hope Unlimited last month, a very special thank you.

Please check out the Pensioners Update at Memories of Rhodesia.

With the water being cut off in Harare, our friends at Renewal Fellowship found out that the Flame Lily Cottages Retirement Home was without water. They arranged for a bore hole to be drilled and a permanent water supply set up for the occupants. There is still $1,000 that needs to be raised to pay off the balance of putting the pump in.  Will you help?

Make a Donation to pay off the water pump for The Flame Lily Cottages, Harare.

 

Join in the Discussion in The Message Boards at Rhodiechat.

Zimbabwe: Open Warfare, Police vs Army on 01 December

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR A STATE OF EMERGENCY TO BE DECLARED IN ZIMBABWE. THIS IS IMMINENT.

I put up a post a few hours ago explaining what I saw of the fight between police and army at Fourth Street Terminus in Harare. I had no idea just what carnage the soldiers had caused until I left the office a little while back. However, this is not what anyone thinks it is. There is method to this whole madness. It is minutely planned.

The soldiers have smashed shop fronts along both Jason Moyo and Nelson Mandela Avenue. On my way home I passed shop after shop with glass shattered and strewn all over the pavement. As those of you who were on the site are aware, I witnessed the start of the fight from my office. We are (un)lucky to have offices overlooking Fourth Street bus terminus, also known as Roadport, which is where the soldiers have been going daily since Friday and causing havoc.

I know most of you think this is the beginning of a mutiny in the ranks of Mugabe's soldiers and at the surface it would appear that way.

First of all, you have to realise that the information I have is coming from inside sources. Second, you also must realise that these incidents are directly linked to the bombing of police stations around Harare this last month (October). The sources who explained what is happening happened to be speaking to someone they trust deeply in my presence and I can assure that the information you are about to read was told only to this person and I. Obviously, you will see this inside information being published by the usual online journals who are now in the habit if visiting here and taking my posts to publish as news of their own. But I am not complaining! This is too important a story and must be shared.

Anyway, here's the thing: This is no mutiny. This is a planned and calculated action and it is not going to stop any time soon. At least not until the final planned action, a State of Emergency. The authorities here in Zim have now made up their minds that the police are sabotaging the efforts to reign in rampant illegal dealings. They think that the police force in Zimbabwe is now passively rebelling against Mugabe, by letting foreign currency dealers and other "criminals" go about their dealings without arresting them. They also suspect strongly that it is the police force that is bombing its own stations, as even the Police Commissioner himself said after the first bomb a few weeks ago. But this is not the main motivation for what you are seeing here. It is only part of a larger strategy by Mugabe, designed specifically to create the conditions necessary for a State of Emergency. The police are not part of this plan, but the bombs come in handy for this strategy.

It was confirmed to me today, before I heard this inside source speaking, that soldiers are being paid their money at the barracks. I was at my bank earlier that day and was discussing the matter of the soldiers with my manager as general chit-chat when he specifically mentioned that they have always been taking money to the barracks and paying soldiers out in situ. The army commanders have told banks that they should turn away any soldier trying to withdraw cash in town, because tellers are paying out at barracks, so there is no truth to the rumour that the soldiers are going on a rampage after failing to withdraw cash.

Instead, four members of the Joint Operations Council, without the approval or knowledge of the Police Commissioner-General, Augustine Chihuri, managed to convince Mugabe that the police are now complicit in the "financial crimes that are ravaging the country." But this action is not directed at the police as I will explain just now. The police have simply given Mugabe an additional arrow to put into his quiver. The bombs themselves are not a part of this plan and that is why Chihuri is being kept in the dark. No member of the police force is part of this strategy to bring about a state of emergency. This is important to note.

Before he left for Doha, Mugabe approved an operation Final End Times/Magumo Zvamuchese. Its internal acronym in the army is FEET, which they think is quite funny seeing as they will be making people flee. This is an operation in which the army have basically been given authority to usurp the role of the police, whom the JOC and Mugabe believe have failed, "either because they are demoralised or because they are simply not up to job."

The operation is not supposed to end until all places known to be "havens of forex dealers" are completely cleaned out. To do this effectively, the authorities believe, it is necessary to have a state of emergency. That is the ultimate aim. Primarily, this is about the economy, but ZANU PF hawks also believe that it will have the added bonus of effectively making the talks redundant. It is an intricate and very crafty strategy, astonishing for its inventiveness when it is laid bare. And it is working, because virtually publication in the world has swallowed the bait and thinks this is the beginning of a rebellion against Mugabe. It is working as Mugabe planned. So far.

Gideon Gono's concurrent clampdown on "white collar crime"and "indiscipline" is supposed to, in the words of the originators of this plan, "decapitate the beast while the army deals with the body". More importantly, Gono features in this story because, starting Thursday, people will be allowed to withdraw $100 million in one transaction per week. This is a lot of money (my bank manager claims not to earn that much per month from his job). The government believes that when Thursday comes and if nothing is done about these money-changers, the price of the US dollar will rise stupendously, fuelling inflation to even higher levels and frustrating Mugabe's efforts to bring the economy back to some form of stable footing. Under Section 53 of the Emergency rule laws of Zimbabwe, "violation of exchange control" or suspicion that one is about violate exchange control get special attention and would, in the eyes of the government, help in dealing with the "extraordinary threat" this crime is posing to economic security.

IT IS IMPORTANT HERE TO EXPLAIN THAT THE PURPOSE OF ALL THIS IS TWO-PRONGED. ONE ASPECT DEALS WITH HOW TO, IN THE WORDS OF GONO, "DEAL WITH THE CASH PROBLEMS ONCE AND FOR ALL" AND THE OTHER IS TO DEAL A FINAL BLOW TO THE TALKS IN SUCH A WAY THAT THE STATE OF EMERGENCY WILL BE BLESSED BY SADC. The economic war is not central to this strategy. This is about how to retain power without the MDC, who have scuttled the talks by walking away.

The real story, therefore, is not Police vs Army, but Army vs Money-changers, in order to create conditions the world will accept as making a state emergency inevitable. It is just that the police do not know what the army are up to and, "professionally", they are responding to disturbances in the city centre in the manner Mugabe taught them - send in the riot squad and disperse the mob, even if that mob are soldiers. The soldiers in turn resent the police interfering in what they know to be a legitimate operation and they respond by trying to chase away riot police, to leave them to do their job. The soldiers are not aware if the grander plan. They think they are being asked to deal with money-changers once and for all and are not aware how their actions will be used later on next week to achieve the main goal of all this.

The police have been left completely out of this plan because they simply are not trusted anymore. Ask yourself this: soldiers have been "running amok" since Friday last week. Everyday they are on the streets doing this. If this is a mutiny, why has discipline not been enforced? Why are military police amongst the soldiers doing these things? Why, if this is a "mutiny" have soldiers not been confined to barracks? Why are they being let out, driven to specific points and then safely going back to barracks without facing any music there from their superiors? More importantly, ask yourself this: has Mugabe rushed back to Zimbabwe from Middle East where is currently attending a conference? Why not?

Look, it is difficult for a layman to understand this deeply crafty strategy, how to connect the police to the army. This strategy, which has so far managed to fool the world, can be broken down to:

1. The army "rebels", goes on the rampage

2. The State declares a State of Emergency

3. The state of emergency allows the state to (a) rule without the MDC (b) deal "decisively" with the biggest headache it will face after this: the economy, through allowing extraordinary measures to be taken against any "financial terrorist", a phrase you will start hearing a lot about from next week at the earliest.

If you grasp this, then you understand immediately why Mugabe is now not afraid of Chitongai tione."

So, in essence then, the soldiers are deliberately being let out to punish foreign currency dealers, who the government believe are the root cause of the economic problems we face because they are the ones deliberately pushing up forex rates to drive Mugabe out of power. Theirs is a specific mission they have been given and they believe that's all there is to it. They have not been told of the bigger picture.

Another angle to all this is the "looting" of shops. The shops being "looted" are not just any shops. If you care to check, you will see that specific shops owned by two groups of people, are being targeted:

1. The groups in Zimbabwe who are known to be active in dealing in forex: (there is a racial connotation to this, which I will not dignify with an explanation, but all you Zimbabweans know what I am talking about). These are groups of people known not to go to banks even when things are "normal" in the country. Gono has publicly warned them before, I think about two years ago or a year and a half. The government believes that these are the people who fuel the black market because they take their daily cash takings and buy US dollars with them. They are, in the words of one source,"the handmaidens of the money-changers and foreign interests".

2. Prominent businessmen, very successful, who are known to be supporters of the opposition (financially). One of them does not live in Zimbabwe anymore but his business is doing extremely well here. The reasoning behind targeting this group is simple as explained in my presence: you are supporting people who are hitting the economic interests of Zimbabwe, in the hope of bringing Mugabe down, so now we will hit your economic interests. Right back at ya!

But this is only preparation. It is almost certain now that after this exercise has been allowed to run its course, our source does not know the time frame, the current illegitimate government of Zimbabwe will have created sufficient cause to impose a proper state of emergency, complete with proper martial law. The government now believes that this is what is required to restore economic order as well as to allow ZANU PF to continue in power without SADC raising eyebrows and without the MDC. Parliament, the MDC's trump card, is now redundant.

What is certain is that the civilian courts will be suspended and white collar crime, including money-changing and all the other acts classified as "financial crimes" under the current sweeping laws will be tried by the military courts. At this time, I am unable to rule out the imposition of mandatory death sentences for those found guilty.

Search through the pages of this blog and you will see that almost two weeks ago, I predicted exactly this while analysing Mugabe's possible reaction to the breakdown of talks. The whole charade about the soldiers, which most publication on the Internet and in print are reporting at face value, is so that Mugabe has a strong case to present to SADC heads of state on why a State of Emergency was unavoidable. It would be hard for him to get their support if he simply said it was necessary because Morgan refused to join him and therefore made running the country through parliament impossible (because MDC have a majority there).

While the world is looking at the story of soldiers rebelling, gleefully and hopefully reporting their smashing of shop fronts and looting, Mugabe, the past-master at survival (a phrase I have borrowed from the BBC), is actually implementing a strategy that will catch everyone by surprise. By the time they realise what is happening, it will be too late (remember the land invasions, dismissed by everyone before they happened as "He would be mad to do that!")

Already, this evening, while I was still in the office, I got an example of just how wrongly the opposition community is reading this. I got a text message that "soldiers are running amok, chaos everywhere, there will be a demo by ZCTU and NCA.....please pass on". I have deliberately left out the date because I do not want to alert the wrong people before the fact, but I am sure they already know. Anyway, I do not like to think I contributed to what will happen to them this week when their demo is quashed. And it will be quashed.

This is because they mistakenly think that the soldiers will join them and beat back the police. They won't. The soldiers have not rebelled against Mugabe. Which is why Mugabe has not rushed back home from the middle east where he is attending a UN conference. He knows exactly what is happening. And he knows why. And he knows he is safe.

I would dearly love to have a discussion on this with you all. But I do understand if you are afraid to discuss such a frightening issue "on paper". We Zimbabweans have always been like that, so I will understand if you all decide against commenting and debating this.

This is the strategy, unfolding as I explained a couple of weeks back. Make your stand, make your preparations with this in mind.

 

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