Harare - Thousands of squatters ignored a judge's order to leave white-owned farmland on Sunday, deepening a confrontation between descendants of British settlers and the black squatters, many of them veterans of Zimbabwe's independence war.
Police made no move to enforce Judge Paddington Garwe's order, made on Friday, for the squatters to abandon within 24 hours the land they began occupying several weeks ago. Officials of President Robert Mugabe's government appeared to encourage the squatters.
"If the African people want land now, whatever judgment comes from the courts or Government, the liberation struggle continues," Information Minister Chen Chimutengwende said in a radio interview.
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A crowd bussed in from Harare by Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party reportedly marched through the Enterprise Valley, 50 kilometres northeast of the capital, and warned farmers they would evicted and their land redistributed to black Zimbabweans. The incident occurred on Saturday, according to a farming community leader who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Some 600 properties have been occupied since Mugabe last month lost a referendum on a new constitution that would have given him power to seize white-owned land without compensation.
David Hasluck, executive director of the Commercial Farmers Union, said state radio and television have refused to comply with Garwe's order for them to broadcast details of his order for the squatters to abandon occupied properties.
The land occupations threaten production of the country's food and major export crop, tobacco.
About 4 000 white farmers, mostly the descendants of British settlers, own about a third of the country's productive land. Known as Rhodesia, Zimbabwe was a British colony before independence in 1980.
Since 1980, the state has bought more than 2 000 white farms for resettlement, but the programme has been plagued by mismanagement and corruption.
The government has nearly two million acres of agricultural land that has not been used for resettlement and mostly lies idle. The government says it can't afford to parcel up the land into smaller plots and install roads, water pipes and other vital infrastructure. - Sapa-AP
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