Harare | Sunday
HOMES belonging to farm workers and the offices on a white-owned farm in eastern Zimbabwe were burned down on Saturday, a farmers’ spokeswoman said, despite government’s promise to curb violence in the countryside.
“It is confirmed the office complex and farm workers’ houses were burned down. We can confirm serious injuries to persons involved in that clash,” said Jenni Williams, spokeswoman for the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU).
The violence occurred on Bita Farm in the rural district of Hwedza, 100km southeast of Harare, Williams said.
Fearing for his safety, the farm owner had locked himself inside the fence surrounding his house, and could not say how many of his 180 workers had lost their homes, she added.
Police were not reachable for comment, but Williams said the police, the army, and the local war veterans’ land committee were at the farm.
Pro-government veterans of Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation war launched a campaign of farm invasions in February 2000, claiming they were protesting the slow pace of land reform to redress colonial-era inequities.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says the farm invasions are a politically motivated scheme to punish its supporters and to seal off huge swathes of the countryside to prevent them from campaigning for the presidential election, due early next year.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has agreed to two separate pacts during the last week to curb violence in Zimbabwe’s countryside, but farmers say they have yet to see any crack-down on the occupiers, who continue forcing work to a halt on farms and burning grazing land.
In the first pact, brokered by a Commonwealth team in Abuja, Nigeria, Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge said the government would crack down on the politically charged violence, in exchange for British funding of its land reforms.
Although Mugabe has endorsed that deal in principle, he has yet to officially sign on to it.
Days after the Abuja deal, five leaders of neighboring countries met with Mugaeb in Harare for a two-day summit, again urging him to curb the violence and forcing him to meet with his chief critics — including the opposition, church leaders, businesses and white farmers.
The summit ended with no concrete agreement, but Malawian President Bakili Muluzi said Mugabe had assured his neighbors that he would halt the violence.
Neighboring nations fear that Zimbabwe’s long-running political crisis could spill across its borders.
The political turmoil is already scaring off desperately needed foreign investment to the region, and Zimbabwe’s economic depression has all but eliminated a key regional market.