Zimbabwe Police Help Calm Farming Region

Violence that has been raging for a week throughout a rich agricultural district of northwestern Zimbabwe eased Wednesday as regional leaders offered to intervene and police moved against militants who had ransacked dozens of white-owned properties.

But tension remained high in white farming communities, and about 100 families who had been evacuated from their homes last weekend were still unable to return.

Analysts predicted that the relative calm--which came after what is widely considered the worst violence in the 18 months since pro-government militants began occupying white-owned farms--will be temporary. They warned that the recent escalation of mayhem could push Zimbabwe into anarchy.

“Zimbabwe is on the brink of the abyss,” said Laurie Nathan, executive director at the Cape Town-based Center for Conflict Resolution, a respected think tank in neighboring South Africa. “It is on the trajectory of civil war. It is not so much the incidents of violence per se, but the government’s tolerance of violence, its apparent encouragement of violence, its undermining of the judiciary.

“In other words,” he added, “government is acting outside the rule of law. That’s the danger.”

Zimbabwean police said Wednesday that 100 more looting suspects had been arrested in the area surrounding Chinhoyi, about 65 miles northwest of Harare, the capital, bringing to 160 the total number of people detained in recent days.

White farmers had accused the police of aiding or turning a blind eye to the plunder that began last week. But on Wednesday, Zimbabwe’s Commercial Farmers’ Union confirmed that authorities had moved in and no further incidents had been reported.

“There is a lot of police presence,” Jenni Williams, a CFU spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview from Harare. “They are moving from farm to farm trying to recover stolen property.”

Since February 2000, ruling party militants led by veterans of the independence war that ended white rule in 1980 have illegally occupied more than 1,700 white-owned farms. The government has ignored six court rulings to remove the squatters, and nine farmers have been killed since the invasions began.

The latest wave of violence erupted following the arrest Aug. 6 of 21 white farmers on allegations of violence and assault against squatters on their land. Their third application for bail was due to be heard in the high court today.

About 45 white-owned farms have been attacked and looted in the current violence, Williams said; the damage is estimated at more than $6.6 million.

Government opponents and local analysts believe that the violence is a campaign orchestrated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front in a bid to drive farmers and their families off a large swath of one of the nation’s most productive corn and tobacco districts. The editor of Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper was arrested Wednesday after he published a report that alleged police vehicles were used in the looting.

Williams said the farmers would not be cowed.

“They . . . are committed to remaining a part of their community,” she said.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has blamed the farmers for the violence, saying they are trying to obstruct the seizure of about 4,500 farms--the vast majority of the nation’s white-owned agricultural property--for so-called fast-track confiscation without compensation and for redistribution to landless blacks. The government says whites own 70% of the country’s productive farmland.

The violence “is a way of stopping any work on the farms,” said Brian Latham, editor of the Farmer, a weekly agricultural trade magazine based in Harare. “If [Mugabe’s] not directing it, he’s certainly allowing these self-styled war veterans to run riot without any real control. What he is doing has effectively brought farming to a standstill.”

Agriculture is Zimbabwe’s main source of hard currency earnings. Farmers union officials estimated that the nation’s annual commercial farming production will decline 27% by year’s end.

Zimbabwe’s main opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, has called on regional leaders to take decisive action to stem the turmoil before it spreads to other parts of the country.

On Tuesday, leaders of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community acknowledged publicly for the first time that the crisis in Zimbabwe was causing concern, and they appointed a committee of three African presidents--from South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique--that will meet with Mugabe in the coming weeks to tackle the issue.

Analysts, however, expressed doubt that Mugabe will abandon his course of action. If his haphazard land reform program is successful, it will undoubtedly guarantee him votes in next year’s presidential polls from the country’s landless masses, they said.