Mugabe Assails Whites After 2nd Farmer Is Slain

Zimbabwe’s leader vilified white farmers as “enemies of our people” Tuesday, hours after dozens of gunmen besieged a farm and killed a white rancher during the worst spasm of violence in two months of land occupations.

On the 20th anniversary of the nation’s independence from white rule, President Robert Mugabe accused the farmers of “mobilizing, actually coercing” their workers against his rule and wanting to turn the clock back to the colonial era.

Mugabe’s verbal assault on white farmers during an interview with the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcast Corp. was a marked hardening of his stance, even from the televised anniversary speech he had made just minutes before. During that speech, he said he would work to broker a compromise between farmers and the squatters.

Tuesday’s violence on several farms and Mugabe’s rhetoric escalated the conflict that began in February when landless blacks started occupying white-owned land. Squatters now occupy more than 900 farms.

Mugabe has backed the squatters, saying they are veterans of Zimbabwe’s independence war protesting against inequitable land distribution in a country where 4,000 white farmers own a third of the productive farmland.

But many of the squatters, who have begun wearing ruling party T-shirts in recent days, are far too young to have fought in the war.

Opposition politicians say the occupations are an effort by Mugabe to scare white farmers and their workers into abandoning the opposition, which could pose a major challenge to Mugabe’s 20-year rule in parliamentary elections expected to be called next month.

“Violence and intimidation are being orchestrated by Mugabe and his party hierarchy,” said David Coltart, an official of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

Early Tuesday, 40 to 100 attackers armed with AK-47 assault rifles besieged the home of cattle rancher Martin Olds, 42, in western Zimbabwe. Olds was killed in a gun battle, Coltart said. The attackers then burned down his house.

Olds’ death was the latest killing linked to political violence since Saturday, when two MDC members were killed in a firebombing and farmer David Stevens, an MDC supporter, was slain, allegedly by ruling party supporters.

Also Tuesday, attackers wearing ruling party T-shirts rampaged across a white-owned farm 25 miles north of Harare, the capital. They also trashed and looted the farmhouse, whose owners fled.

A white farm owner near Harare also was taken hostage Tuesday. Kevin Tinker was later released, said a neighbor, Hamish Turner.