Land Grab: Zimbabwe's Farm Policy Hits Whites and Blacks, But Blacks Suffer the Worst

Sept. 9 - Louise and Rob Cochrane were enjoying a quiet Sunday morning in their spacious farmhouse in northwestern Zimbabwe on Aug. 18 when their emergency radio crackled the warning they had been dreading for more than a week.

A neighborhood network of fellow white farmers had spotted two vehicles carrying about 15 men - including uniformed and plainclothes policemen - making their way to the gates of the Cochranes' 1,322-acre farm in Karoi, about 125 miles north of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare.

Like hundreds of white farmers across the country, the Cochranes were defying what they call an illegal eviction order from the Zimbabwean government demanding that approximately 2,900 white farmers leave their land by Aug. 9.

In the tense days following the expiration of the deadline, more than 200 white farmers resisting the order were arrested. Foreseeing the inevitable, the Cochranes had put together an emergency action plan.

"We decided that I would stay with the children and Rob would leave the farmhouse since we didn't think they'd arrest me," Louise said in a telephone interview from Harare. "But they were adamant that I abandon my children and come with them to the police station. I was very angry about that."

Leaving her son, Thomas, 7, and daughter, Alice, 3, with the maid, Louise was taken to the Karoi jail, where she was detained for a night along with seven other white farmers from the area.

After a court hearing the next morning, Louise was released without any terms or conditions, but the experience so jolted her that she decided to spend a few days in Harare before returning to the farm in Karoi.

"I just needed a change," she told ABCNEWS.com. "I thought it might be good to stay away - just for a few days."

Like Louise, Dixon Mugagwa is also taking a break in the bustling, relative anonymity of the capital.

Yet another temporary refugee from the violence engulfing rural Zimbabwe, the 32-year-old black farm laborer came to Harare from the Buhera district in southeastern Zimbabwe earlier this month.

But unlike Louise, Mugagwa says he has no idea when he will be able to return home to his wife and three children.

A supporter of Zimbabwe's opposition MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) party, Mugagwa says he came to Harare for medical treatment after being arrested and tortured by local policemen.

"It happened on July 14, when the police came to my house to fetch me because I supported the MDC," Mugagwa told ABCNEWS.com in a phone interview.

"While we were on the way to the police station, they produced a pistol and told me to get out and fall on the ground and started to beat my buttocks and legs and feet with their batons and asked me for the names of MDC people."

Along with a group of other MDC supporters, Mugagwa says he was taken to the Buhera police station, where they were severely beaten over a period of three days. The police accused the men of torching a local official's hut, a charge the men deny and insist is politically trumped up. A court hearing is scheduled for October.

But as reports of arrests and torture incidents in the area mounted, Mugagwa says he was forced to flee to Harare, where he is staying in a safe house run by the Amani Trust, a Zimbabwean-based aid agency.

For the moment, he's safe. But his troubles are far from over. More than a month after his imprisonment, Mugagwa says he is unable to work or even sit since his buttocks and genitals are sore from the baton beatings he received.

Mugagwa's story is not unique. Like millions of black Zimbabweans, he says he is the victim of the very government that has promised to right a history of colonial wrongs.

When Robert Mugabe took over the reins of the newly formed Zimbabwe in 1980 after nearly a century of white settler colonization and restrictions on black access to lands, he inherited a volatile landownership pattern. White farmers - who constituted less than 1 percent of the population - owned more than 70 percent of the country's most fertile lands.

After years of economic crisis accompanied by riots and strikes, Mugabe introduced a controversial campaign in 2000 to take over white-owned farms. It was sold as a "Robin Hood-style" policy of taking from the rich and giving to the poor - with a racial twist.

But rights groups say the campaign has been accompanied by grave human rights violations. And experts warn that the country today is spiraling into political, economic and social chaos.

Mugabe and his party - the ZANU-PF - have controlled the country for more than two decades amid brutal crackdowns on any opposition.

Economically, the country that was once called Africa's "breadbasket" is facing starvation as rights groups warn that land seized from white farmers is being allocated only to Mugabe's circle of cronies and supporters.

And socially, millions of Zimbabweans - black and white - live in a climate of fear, intimidation and often brutal violence.

"The situation in Zimbabwe today shows what happens when governments fail to create institutions to deal with inequalities through legal methods," said Michelle Sieff from the Africa Division of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk-assessment and industry research group. "The pressure grows, governments then resort to illegal means and the process gets hijacked for political ends."

As opposition to Mugabe's ZANU-PF party among the whites and educated black Zimbabweans grows, 186 MDC supporters have been killed in the past two years, including 11 white farmers.

But some experts say that while the plight of Zimbabwe's white farmers has grabbed world attention, the people worst affected by the violence were black Zimbabweans, most of whose gruesome experiences never made it to the international headlines.

"White farmers are facing comparatively limited measures of brutality and harassment from the state because they are too visible," said John Makumbe, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe and chairman of Transparency International Zimbabwe, a Harare-based nongovernmental organization. "When a white farmer is evicted, all the media will focus on it. When 50 black workers are thrown off the farm and threatened, nobody covers it."

A week after her arrest, Louise Cochrane, a third-generation Zimbabwean whose grandparents came up from neighboring South Africa, is not prepared to give up on the land of her birth - at least not yet.

"We're determined to a certain extent to stick it out," she said. "This is our country and we're entitled to stay here."

But as the number of joyless farewells for their friends leaving for Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States grows, and the situation in Zimbabwe only gets worse, the Cochranes admit they have to be pragmatic.

"For starters we will consider other options here in Africa - like Zambia or Mozambique - or then there's New Zealand and Australia. It depends on whether they will have us," said Rob with a mirthless chuckle. "Ultimately, it comes down to economic security."

But while economic security sounds like a good idea to Mugagwa, it seems like an impossible dream. Earlier this month, he says a group of militias linked to the ZANU-PF stormed into his Buhera hut, beat up his wife and looted his farming tools.

"Now, I have no tools for planting. I don't have any money to buy new tools and to feed my wife and children. I don't know what to do," he said.

Mugagwa worries about his family's security as rights groups warn about an increasing number of politically motivated rapes in the countryside. But he fears that if the family leaves Buhera, they would lose everything to the militias and war veterans plaguing rural Zimbabwe.

"I'm not worried about the survival of the white farmers," said John Prendergast, Africa Program co-director at the International Crisis Group. "What's frightening is that 1 ½ million farm workers and their families are literally homeless and desperate and are completely falling through the crisis."

For its part, the Zimbabwean government insists that its latest land-reform measures are going well.

"As far as land redistribution goes, we are almost on target," said Edward Matumhe, a spokesman at the Ministry of Information and Publicity. "A number of new farmers are ready for the [October] rainy season and the government is assisting them with agricultural inputs like fertilizers, chemicals and livestock."

But experts and witnesses paint an abysmal picture of rural Zimbabwe, with squatters occupying farmlands, inexperienced new farmers provided no deeds for the land, and bands of militiamen harassing the population with apparent state impunity.

Asked if the government was committed to investigating the growing number of cases of alleged police torture of MDC supporters, Matumhe said: "What can I say? We get this sort of information from bad NGO groups and newspaper reports. We have no details of this."

But when provided a detailed list of alleged police torture cases in Buhera since April - which MDC officials say are just a fraction of the political violence cases recorded in the district - Matumhe says the government will look into them. "The police as a security organization will investigate these allegations," he said, adding, "these allegations, which we hear time and time again."

From the Harare offices of the Amani Trust, Mugagwa brushes aside these governmental promises.

"This will go on, it will go on until that, that guy Robert Mugabe surrenders," he said. "He's taking the farms and giving them to his relatives. We are getting nothing. I don't know how I will survive. I don't know how I will feed my children. This is hell."

In April 1980, the British flag was taken down from the state house in Harare and Robert Mugabe took over the reins of the newly formed nation of Zimbabwe after a seven-year war against the government of Ian Smith, the white-supremacist prime minister of Rhodesia. It was a period of post-colonial African hope.

Although centuries of settler colonization had put more than 70 percent of the country's most fertile lands in the hands of white farmers, who constituted less than 1 percent of the population, Mugabe initially fostered a spirit of reconciliation and granted blanket amnesty to everyone on both sides of the independence war.

While the inequities of land ownership were acknowledged during the pre-independence talks - which led to the signing of an agreement between the two sides - the details of land reform under the agreement have been the subject of diplomatic bickering between Britain and Zimbabwe.

While Mugabe has insisted that Britain promised to pay for the redistribution of white-owned land during the 1979 talks, Britain has maintained that no document signed during the negotiations provides for this.

Successive British grants to finance land reform have been bogged down in diplomatic wrangling as London has periodically expressed dissatisfaction with Mugabe's reform measures, which London maintained were preconditions for British financial help.

The 1990s saw a worsening economic crisis as the failure of economic restructuring measures lead to riots, strikes and a growing opposition to Mugabe's government.

By the turn of the century, Mugabe seized on the land issue for his political gains. The government's failure to crackdown on squatters on white-owned land was followed by a policy of seizing white-owned farms.

Mugabe's political woes, however, worsened after the March 2002 elections were condemned as seriously flawed. Currently, the European Union has imposed "smart sanctions" on Zimbabwe and the Bush administration has announced that it is working to foster opposition to Mugabe.

Yes, it will get worse. This article isn't very objective either.

After years of economic crisis accompanied by riots and strikes, Mugabe introduced a controversial campaign in 2000 to take over white-owned farms.

Mugabe's political woes, however, worsened after the March 2002 elections were condemned as seriously flawed.

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