Zimbabwe Squatters Continue Farm Attacks

A day after leaders of armed squatters who have violently occupied white-owned farms in Zimbabwe pledged to halt the bloodshed, two more homesteads were reportedly torched Thursday and several black farm workers, apparently regarded as white sympathizers, were assaulted.

Although Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe prepared to host talks on the issue today with regional leaders, political observers were only cautiously optimistic that an end to the turmoil is anywhere in sight. The key to peace, they say, rests solely with Mugabe and his willingness to order the war-veteran squatters from the farms--something he has so far proved unwilling to do.

“What is likely to defuse the crisis are the talks that are ongoing between the war veterans, the commercial farmers and Mugabe,” said John Makumbe, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s department of political and administrative studies. “I do not think any external leaders are likely to have adequate influence on [him]. He is likely to impress upon them that it is really an internal matter that they would be better off not interfering in.”

Uncertainty over whether the crisis will abate soon has forced scores of white farmers to evacuate their land, and many have fled the countryside to Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. Predominantly descendants of British settlers, hundreds of them have sought to regain British citizenship out of fear that Zimbabwe is edging closer toward a state of emergency.

So far, two farmers have been killed, at least six others badly beaten and several farmhouses burned to the ground. A farm foreman and a policeman have also been killed by armed invaders.

With their president branding them “enemies of Zimbabwe,” many whites said they fear for their lives.

“We’re scared. We’ve got nobody to look after us,” farmer Martin Pereira, 52, told reporters in Harare. “We are totally alone.”

Some residents of the capital expressed concern that the frustrations of white farmers who have fled to the city might trigger racial tensions in Harare as well.

Analysts said Mugabe, once a widely respected black liberation fighter, is unlikely to order squatters to leave the farms, because he is seeking their support in upcoming parliamentary elections--for which a date has yet to be set.

The nation’s economic meltdown and Zimbabwe’s involvement in an unpopular war in nearby Congo have eroded Mugabe’s popularity in recent months. He needs support from wherever he can muster it, the analysts say.

“He is simply trying to survive politically,” Makumbe said. “It’s nearing election time, and he has always used the issue of land as a political campaign strategy. He has even combined it with the race [issue]. He is literally just trying to attract the popular vote, particularly among the rural people.”

A court has ordered the government and police to evict the war veterans, who have occupied hundreds of the country’s 4,500 predominantly white-owned farms on land that was confiscated under British colonial rule. But complying with the court order would be tantamount to political suicide for Mugabe, analysts said.

“[The veterans] actually have the capacity to remove him from office, or so he believes,” Makumbe said. “So because of that fear in him, they can have him eating out of their hands.”

Zimbabwe won its independence from Britain in 1980. The former colonial power has been at the forefront of criticism of Zimbabwe’s failure to order Mugabe’s supporters to obey the law, but opposition leaders have appealed to Britain to deal carefully with him, warning that attacking him would backfire and further boost his support.

“Britain has the choice: either to confront Mugabe’s government or to engage with it,” Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, recently told a British newspaper. “If you confront him, you will make him into a kind of martyr, and that is exactly what he wants.”

Richard Calland, a Cape Town-based political analyst, said that South African President Thabo Mbeki’s approach of “quiet diplomacy” might succeed in putting pressure on Mugabe to reverse his much-criticized stance when Mbeki meets with him today at Victoria Falls. The leaders of Namibia and Mozambique will also join the talks, one round of which will focus on the crisis in the continent’s Great Lakes region.

But other observers predicted that Mugabe would sooner violate the rule of law, alienate the whites who are the nation’s economic backbone and watch Zimbabwe slide into anarchy than risk losing his support base.

“The alternative is that he observes the rule of law, alienates the voters, loses his majority in parliament and eventually gets out of office--something that he doesn’t envision at all,” Makumbe said.