Harare | Tuesday
A WHITE Zimbabwean farmer has been arrested in connection with the death of a black man who received land on the farmer’s property under a controversial government resettlement scheme, police said on Monday.
Philip Bezuidenhout allegedly ran over Phibian Mapenzauswa on Saturday and dragged him under his truck for 20 metres at the farm near Odzi in eastern Zimbabwe, said Inspector Bothwell Mugariri.
Mapenzauswa was among a group of black men who had gone to see their new plots on Bezuidenhout’s farm, which had been targeted under a government programme to seize white- owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks.
The police would not give any more details because the case is due to go before the courts, most likely on Tuesday, Mugariri said.
Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said the police had held talks with war veterans who have led the invasion of white-owned farms in the last 18 months to appeal for calm.
“We are happy to say we have reduced the chances of revenge attacks (on white farmers) to allow the legal process to run its course,” he said, dismissing rumours that some white farmers had been kidnapped by angry veterans of Zimbabwe’s independence war.
War veteran leaders denounced Mapenzauswa’s alleged murder, saying it could force those who have moved onto white farms to take action in a “more revolutionary way”.
“We are warning those (whites) who are still living on occupied farms to move out of those farms,” Endy Mhlanga, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association told Zimbabwe state television.
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo condemned the alleged murder of Mapenzauswa as racially-motivated, and said the government expected the “full wrath of the law” to take its course.
“This is a callous, premeditated, cold-blooded murder which smacks of the Ku Klux Klan-type of murders done in the United States and South Africa,” Moyo told the state-owned Herald newspaper. Zimbabwe has suffered an economic and political crisis since February last year when self-styled war veterans, encouraged by the state, seized hundreds of white-owned farms across the country.
The land chaos has sparked fears of food shortages and foreign donors have cut off aid in protest over the government’s handling of the land issue.
The government plans to seize at least five million hectares of the 12 million hectares held by white farmers and has earmarked more than 5_000 farms for redistribution.
President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the southern African country since independence from Britain in 1980, says 4_500 white farmers hold 70% of Zimbabwe’s best land.
The government says it will compensate farmers for improvements only, not the land, which Mugabe says was “stolen” from blacks during the British colonial era. – Reuters
*ZA NOW:
Zimbabwe farmer kills would-be settler July 16, 2001