President Robert Mugabe vowed to crack down on whites in Zimbabwe who oppose his policies and have defied eviction orders to abandon their farms, state media reported on Thursday.
Mugabe said half the 2 900 white farmers served eviction notices disobeyed a recent deadline to leave their properties under a government program that seizes land from whites and redistributes it to landless blacks.
”Time is not on their side,” Mugabe was quoted by state radio as saying. The increasingly authoritarian leader said his government would take action against those who defied its orders.
Despite a looming famine in southern Africa, Mugabe has continued with the seizure of 95% of the white-owned farmland in the country, bringing to a standstill an industry that once helped feed southern Africa.
About six million Zimbabweans are threatened with starvation.
Mugabe also lashed out against two prominent white lawmakers from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
”Your place is in prison and nowhere else. Otherwise your home is outside the country,” Mugabe said of the two politicians upon his return to Zimbabwe from neighboring South Africa.
Mugabe was greeted at the Harare airport on Wednesday by thousands of bussed in supporters. He had been attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
Mugabe used his address there on Monday to blame Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, and other Western countries for the poverty and despair in his country.
He also defended his seizure of white-owned farms, saying the program pitted the majority against the white minority he described as obdurate and backed by the British.
Zimbabwe was singled out for criticism by US Secretary of State Colin Powell during his speech at the summit, saying the government was leading its people to the brink of starvation through its land policies.
About 300 white farmers had been arrested since an August 8 eviction deadline, police said earlier this week. Most were freed on bail but have been forbidden to return to their farms before their trials begin.
Scores of others fled their farms fearing arrest.
The state Herald newspaper said Mugabe told the crowd of several thousand supporters at the Harare airport that the government was also planning to seize stakes in foreign owned companies and mines that he said were ”scooping out our wealth.”
”They can’t continue like that, using our wealth,” Mugabe was quoted as saying. Since March 2000, the government has begun targeting white-owned land for allocation to landless blacks. Most of the country’s commercial farmland had been in the hands of the white minority.
The land conflict has added to political unrest in the country and critics say many prime farms have gone to politicians, military and police officers, and government cronies instead of the poor. – Sapa-AP