Robert Mugabe turns the screw on Zimbabwe’s dwindling white farmers
President Robert Mugabe’s regime is stepping up its intimidation of Zimbabwe’s white farmers as he seeks a sixth term in office.A few hundred landowners managed to stay put on small portions of their original properties despite Mr Mugabe’s land seizures, which began in 2000 and destroyed commercial agriculture, the backbone of the economy. But the president’s re-election campaign ahead of next weekend’s election is driven by the notion that the country’s independence is under threat.
He has long presented the farm confiscations as part of Zimbabwe’s struggle for freedom.
Deon Theron, a vice-president of the Commercial Farmers Union, is on trial in Harare magistrates’ court. He faces a two-year prison sentence if he is convicted of trespassing on the farm he bought 24 years ago.
His farm in Beatrice, about 40 miles south of Harare, used to produce about two per cent of all the milk consumed in the capital, but an eviction order was issued against the Therons a year ago.
Their property has been targeted by Elias Musakwe, an executive of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. He has planted maize, which will never germinate, on the cattle pasture, and is intimidating the family by parking a tractor against the Therons’ daughter’s bedroom window.
A court ruled this week that Mr Theron could not fight prosecution claims that a state document allowing them to stay on the farm was a forgery. “It is not fair, it’s not fair,” said Mrs Theron.
Scores of white farmers who have survived daily torment from Mr Mugabe’s travelling “war veterans” are now appearing in shabby courtrooms around the country, accused of defying eviction orders.
Zimbabwean-born George Fick and his wife Jill, who are also dairy farmers in Beatrice, went on trial in Harare this week and were told by the state that their desire to remain in their home was “frivolous and vexatious”.
“We don’t have money to leave the farm or a house in town or money overseas,” said Mrs Fick. “We have nowhere else to go.” There has been one glimmer of hope. A ruling in Chinhoyi said that another farmer, Doug Taylor-Freeme, had no case to answer as he had been granted an extension to his eviction order.
But the rule of law is a hazy concept in Mr Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Mr Taylor-Freeme has a gang of men allied to the ruling Zanu-PF party camped outside his kitchen door, ordered there by Chief Wilson Memakonde, a Zanu-PF senator who has already taken possession of five white-owned farms.
In Chiredzi, in south-eastern Zimbabwe, Digby Nesbitt and his wife Jessie share their home with the area’s assistant commissioner Edmore Veterai and 15 of his relatives, who moved in earlier this year.
The Nesbitts say they are determined to stay in the house because if they leave they will not be able to return.
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