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Desperate Mugabe begins new assault on white-owned farms
Catherine Philp, The Times (UK)
April 08, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article3701819.ece

The sound of hands beating on drums grows louder, chanting voices chiming in, more insistent, wilder with every minute. At the entrance to the driveway, young men stand scowling, inhaling on fat joints. A lone policeman, trembling with fear, hangs back, glancing up and down the road.

At the corner of the driveway a farm invasion is in full swing. A hundred-strong mob bays against a flimsy wire fence and drunken men with cold, glazed eyes, surround our car with menace. Inside, a besieged, frightened family is weighing its options.

"Mr Westheim is not coming out," a bearded man in a Mugabe T-shirt tell us in a mocking voice as others parade around, whipping up the mob. Perhaps we could persuade him to leave, the still shaking policeman tells us. "We don't want violence," he says.

Violence and intimidation are, however, what this is all about, the last refuge of a wounded President fighting desperately to cling to power. Eight years after he launched his first bloody campaign to seize white-owned farms, Robert Mugabe has unleashed his shock troops again.

Westheim Farm became yesterday the ninth in northern Centenary to fall to a raid by so-called war veterans, the militias who led the first wave of farm seizures, sparking the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy. Nationwide, it was the 23rd farm to be invaded over a weekend of violence as Mr Mugabe whipped up fears of a new "white invasion" of Zimbabwe.

On Friday the veterans — many of whom are too young to have fought against white rule 30 years ago — marched through Harare. The Movement for Democratic Change, they said, was plotting to hand back farms to their previous owners and the country to its former colonial masters. In reality, there were no returning farmers, so the veterans turned their ire on the last of white farmers in Zimbabwe.

Uys van der Westhuizen was merely monitoring developments when the invasions began miles away in southern Masvingo, but on Sunday morning he awoke to a "terrible commotion" from Tom and Karen Price's neighbouring farm. "By that afternoon, three farms had been breached and we were thinking of how to get out," Mr van der Westhuizen told The Times. "One farmer set off for Mount Darwin but discovered that they had made a blockade on the road and we were trapped." The family decided they had no choice but to stay put and hunkered down behind the grenade-proof walls and blast doors.

Mr Mugabe was at a family funeral when news of the invasions trickled out. He told mourners: "The land is ours, it must not be allowed to slip back into the hands of whites." The next morning the occupants of Westheim Farm woke before six o'clock to the sounds of drums outside their windows. The veterans, many drunk or high, had arrived.

"You know what we've come for," one of their leaders shouted through the fence. Then they took the black labourers from their lodgings and marched them before the house where Mr Westhuizen could see them. They would not let them go, they said, unless he handed over the keys.

At the Commercial Farmers' Union in Harare, reports of invasions were pouring in, as were hints of the orders that had been given. "We were told that they came from the very highest levels of government," Trevor Gifford, the union's president, said. "They said they wanted to see white farmers' bodies on the streets by Monday."

When The Times arrived at Westheim Farm on Monday, tension was mounting. The family had not left and the mob was growing agitated. Mr van der Westhuizen fashioned a fake copy of his kitchen key from an old one. He, his three daughters, son, brother-in-law and wife, walked through the mob to their cars and got in.

At the gate, the veterans suddenly baulked. "We thought we'd had it, that they'd sussed out the key," he said. "It was really sticky for that moment." But the vets suddenly threw open the gate and the family fled in convoy to Harare, where they went into hiding.

Only a couple of hundred white farmers have remained on their land in Zimbabwe. Fears are growing that in the lead-up to a possible presidential run-off second vote, the farmers and their thousands of black laborers, the lucky few still to have employment, will once again find themselves in the front line of Mr Mugabe's war.

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