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War vets want 'protection' for white farmers
ZimOnline
October 31, 2006

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=372

HARARE - War veterans in the Midlands have asked President Robert Mugabe to help stop senior ruling ZANU PF party officials from evicting the few remaining white farmers in the province.

In an ironic twist to Zimbabwe's chaotic land reforms, the war veterans said the government should protect white farmers who are willing to co-exist with the newly resettled black farmers.

The war veterans were at the forefront in spearheading the government's violent land seizure programme which began in 2000 and that also left several white farmers and their black workers dead or injured.

In a four-page letter to Mugabe seen by ZimOnline, the former fighters said the President should stop the evictions "if government policy of increased production, employment creation and foreign currency generation is to be achieved."

"Your Excellency, we are surprised by the current wave of evictions against the remaining white farmers who were left because of their willingness to co-exist with new farmers . . . We see greed, sabotage and distortion of government policies.

"We have concrete evidence of people who never worked on the pieces of land that they were initially allocated, but are now occupying or clamouring to occupy farmhouses . . . at the expense of productivity." reads part of the letter.

About 600 out of the slightly more than 4 000 strong white farmers who were there before the land reforms in 2000, are still on their properties after the majority were forced to emigrate to mostly neighbouring countries.

Mugabe says the land reforms were necessary to correct a land tenure system that favoured whites and left millions of blacks crowded on poor, sandy soils.

But war veterans and black villagers have often complained in the past that senior ZANU PF and government officials were hounding them out of the farms they occupied at the height of the land reforms.

Mugabe has also admitted that government ministers and senior ruling party officials had used their privileged positions to grab several farms for themselves ignoring government policy of one-man-one-farm. - ZimOnline

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