IN THE MOST VIOLENT ATTACK ON FARMERS YET, INVADERS OCCUPYING WHITE-OWNED LAND REPORTEDLY SHOT TO DEATH A FARMER AND
ABDUCTED FOUR OTHERS.
By Paul Salopek
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
April 16, 2000
HARARE, Zimbabwe -- Despite a government order to end their protests, thousands of squatters are refusing to budge from
white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, raising anxieties about where the country's explosive land-rights crisis is heading and
whether it can be controlled.
Since Thursday, when the government announced it no longer supports the land invasions, a white farmer reportedly has
been shot to death and four others kidnapped, and farm sources said that fewer than 200 squatters have abandoned their
plastic-tarp camps in dusty fields and fruit groves across the nation. The land invasions have continued, occupying at
least 600 farms by Friday.
Meanwhile, the leadership of the squatters, many of them disaffected veterans of Zimbabwe's 1970s liberation war, is
still bellowing threats at the descendants of British settlers who make up less than 1 percent of Zimbabwe's population
but who till the country's most fertile soils.
"Dr. Hunzvi has no power to withdraw the war veterans from their motherland," veterans' leader and medical doctor
Chenjerai Hunzvi said at a boisterous rally of about 1,000 squatters on Saturday. "Even if I had the power, it would be
against my conscience."
Earlier, Hunzvi vowed to continue confronting the white farmers "who have stolen our ancestors' land" even though
Zimbabwe's acting president urged the squatters to abandon their seizures of white-owned farms on Thursday. Hunzvi said
the squatters would listen only to President Robert Mugabe, who has been away at a conference in Cuba.
For more of the story click here.