Zimbabwe’s embattled white commercial farmers remain wary after the expiry of the latest eviction deadline to quit their properties under President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme, a farmers group said on Sunday.
A new unconfirmed deadline for some of the farmers to leave their land expired at noon (1000 GMT) Sunday with some who were seeking to comply being prevented from removing property, a farming crisis group reported.
But by late Sunday only two confrontations had been reported.
One farmer in Doma, 160 kilometres northwest of Harare, was ordered by an army major not to remove property, saying it belonged to him, Worswick said.
In the Tengwe farming area, also in northwestern Zimbabwe, another farmer was barricaded inside his house, while eight farmers who went to help him were stoned by an angry mob, and one of them was assaulted, Worswick said.
”It (the eviction deadline) is not as bad as we expected it could have been,” Justice for Agriculture (JAG) Vice-chairman John Worswick told AFP.
However, he said farmers were not being complacent.
”We’re expecting it to escalate,” he said.
The new deadline — which police could not confirm — comes exactly one month after around 2 900 of the country’s 4 500 farmers who had been served with eviction orders were supposed to leave their land to make way for new black farmers.
Around 60% of farmers affected by that deadline refused to leave their farms and more than 300 were arrested.
”There are concerns this could have been a practice run for something else,” JAG representative, Jenni Williams said. But she added that most of the country’s commercial farming areas had remained quiet.
Mashonaland West province ”in their droves” to avoid
confrontation.
A member of the farming community in Karoi, Mashonaland West, who asked not to be named, said farmers there with eviction orders, most of them overturned, had moved off their farms on Sunday evening.
”They will be farming again on Monday,” he said.
Another four white farmers were briefly arrested Saturday in Bindura, north of Harare, allegedly for trying to remove property, JAG said.
JAG said the latest directive had been delivered by government officials, including police chiefs, but did not give any names. The ultimatum affected all farmers, even those whose eviction notices had been overturned, the statement added.
Contacted on Sunday, police representative Wayne Bvudzijena told AFP he was not aware of any deadline, saying it would have to be issued by the ministry of agriculture.
Under Zimbabwe’s Land Acquisition Act, farmers who receive a government eviction notice, or ”Section 8”, are given 90 days to wind up farming operations and leave their homes.
More than 70 white farmers have had their eviction notices declared invalid. However, the government has said it will simply reissue the eviction orders following the letter of the law, and threatened to give the farmers just five days to leave their farms.
Mugabe, after returning from the UN Earth Summit in South Africa where he had a verbal sparring match with Tony Blair, prime minister of former colonial power Britain, last week again warned white farmers to hand their land over to blacks or leave the country.
”They (white farmers) belong to Britain and let them go there.
If they want to stay here, we will say: ‘Stay here, but your place is in jail’,” the 78-year-old leader said. – Sapa-AFP