Posted on 08/16/2002 5:16:20 AM PDT by Clive
GWANDA, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - A Zimbabwean court charged five white farmers on Friday for defying President Robert Mugabe's August 8 deadline to hand over their farms to landless blacks.
The government has ordered 2,900 of the remaining 4,500 white commercial farmers to quit their land without compensation, but nearly two-thirds are refusing to go.
Police said on Friday they were moving in on defiant farmers. The land reforms have caused upheavals at a time when Zimbabwe faces food shortages.
The five farmers appeared before a magistrate in the southwestern town of Gwanda and were charged with defying orders to leave their farms in Matabeleland province.
"You did not obey and continued farming in contravention of section nine of the Land Acquisition Act," the state prosecutor told farmers Dudley Herbert Rogers, Thomas Gavin Connolly, Lucas Cornelius van Vuuren, Peter Johannes Cloete and James McDonald Crawford.
Magistrate William Kasitomo did not ask the farmers to plead but ordered four of them to return to court on September 6 and the fifth on September 16. He granted each man bail of 5,000 Zimbabwe dollars ($90).
About 10 war veterans and a truckload of riot police waited outside the court building, but there were no incidents.
Farm lobby group Justice for Agriculture (JAG) had earlier said six white farmers were expected to appear in court. It said as many as 50 farmers in the area could be charged.
MORE ARRESTS SEEN
Mugabe vowed this week to push ahead with his land campaign despite severe criticism at home and abroad, saying he will not allow any "avoidable impediments" to delay the completion of his "fast-track resettlement" by the end of August.
An estimated six million Zimbabweans, nearly half the country's population, face food shortages due to the disruption on the farms and drought.
JAG said it had received reports from Mashonaland Central and East provinces that groups of police, war veterans and government officials had visited farmers and ordered them to leave by 5 p.m. local time (1500 GMT) on Friday or face arrest.
Farmers' spokesmen say nearly 60 percent of the 2,900 white farmers targeted for eviction under Mugabe's fast-track land resettlement scheme are defying the government order.
But police said they would crack down on farmers who refused to budge.
"We are slowly making inroads on culprits who have orchestrated the resistance. Those who are encouraging the commercial farmers to ignore the law will be dealt with," Friday's official Herald newspaper quoted police spokesman Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena as saying.
Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo -- who chairs the government's land acquisition audit committee -- told the Herald the government would take action against farmers defying the evictions in the next few days.
"We are considering a number of options to ensure that the land redistribution program that we embarked on is not unnecessarily derailed by some defiant white commercial farmers," Chombo said.
Black militants armed with clubs and stones forced a white farmer from his land in northeastern Zimbabwe on Wednesday in the first farm seizure since the deadline expired a week ago.
Mugabe, who has been in power since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, says his land redistribution drive is aimed at correcting colonial injustice which left 70 percent of the country's best farmland in the hands of white commercial farmers. ($1=55.45 Zimbabwe Dollar)
My ISP had been rejecting emails from me since yesterday, so I cannot send the usual mass emails to editors & opinionators.
If you want to take a crack at email activism, look here:
Ignorance Making You Ill? Cure It!
for links, tools, & instructions about how to contact a pile of different people, and how to send a link to this story right here ( or anywhere else ) to a "mass email" using Outlook Express.
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