Shalom All:

White farmer freed from 'living hell' in Zimbabwe prison
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/29/wzim29.xml
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Roy Bennett, a coffee farmer whose land was seized by the government, was one of three white MPs representing the Movement for Democratic Change when he was jailed by parliament for assaulting Patrick Chinamasa during a debate on the controversial land reform programme.

"The conditions I witnessed in prison were how I imagine hell," he said. "To witness fellow prisoners being beaten on a daily basis, to hear their screams, see them stripped of their dignity is unimaginable."

He said he had not been beaten himself but had been given a tattered prison garment covered in human excrement when he entered the "filthy" top security prison at Mutoko, 90 miles north-east of the capital Harare.

Mr Bennett, 48, lost his 7,000-acre farm in the Chimanimani highlands in eastern Zimbabwe in 2000 during Mr Mugabe's purge of the country's white commercial farmers in the name of "land reform".

Because of his outspoken political views, Zanu-PF supporters were urged to occupy his land and threaten his family and their workers.

His wife, who was pregnant, had a machete held to her throat and was forced to sing songs praising Mr Mugabe.

She later lost her unborn baby.

Thugs looted and vandalised the Bennett home while so-called "war veterans" killed or stole hundreds of head of their cattle and "confiscated" 150 tons of the coffee crop. Mr Bennett was sentenced to a year's imprisonment by parliament's privilege committee after the flare-up in the chamber.
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Dianne
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( talsmawi@centurytel.net for flow chart of Revelation Seals. )