LAWRENCE BARTLETT, Harare | Friday 7.45pm.
ZIMBABWE’S besieged white farmers won a court battle Friday over the occupation of their land by independence war veterans, despite President Robert Mugabe’s public approval of the invasions.
High Court judge Paddington Garwe declared the occupations illegal and ordered the thousands of squatters who have invaded more than 500 farms to leave within 24 hours.
The Commericial Farmers’ Union (CFU), which represents most of Zimbabwe’s 4,000 white farmers, went to court over the issue after Mugabe refused to order the squatters off.
“We want the whites to learn that the land belongs to Zimbabweans,” Mugabe said last week.
Apparently with this in mind, the court also ordered the commissioner of police to disregard any instruction from any “person holding executive power in Zimbabwe” which countered the eviction order.
The war veterans who led the squatters onto the farms said they were simply reclaiming land stolen by white colonialists in this former rebel British colony of Rhodesia.
War veterans association leader Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi refused to answer questions as he left court on whether the squatters would now withdraw from the farms.
A few dozen war veterans had picketed the entrance to the high court, singing revolutionary songs and holding placards denouncing white judges and threatening them with violence.
Three white Supreme Court judges, named in the placards, were told to “step down or we’ll (make) them bow down through physical force today.”
The High Court judge who handed down the eviction order Friday is black.
Other posters said the “country was born through the barrel of the gun” and problems should be solved through revolutionary means and not “repressive law courts”.
White farmers, who brought the court action, were warned: “Don’t play with fire. Now we will grab the whole land”.
The court also ordered the Zimbabwe National War Veterans Association and a representative of Mugabe’s party not to encourage or allow any demonstration against the holding of commercial farmland according to race.
The farm invasions began several weeks ago after voters rejected a new draft constitution which would have given the government the power to seize white-owned land without paying for it.
Mugabe, who took power in 1980 after a bitter guerrilla war against white minority rule, has now given notice that he intends to amend the old constitution to include just such a provision.
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