IRIN Focus on latest efforts to resolve the farming crisis

The director of the predominantly white Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), David Hasluck, said he hoped to meet President Robert Mugabe on Thursday in a new effort to quell growing violence on farms occupied by independence war veterans and supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party.

Running out of options

But he told IRIN: “We have now frankly run out of options. I just don’t know where we go from here or where this situation will lead.” So far the violence has claimed at least 18 lives, the majority of them members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Hasluck said more than 700 white-owned farms were now occupied. After visiting several of the farms in recent days with Chenjerai Hunzvi, leader of the Zimbabwe National War Veterans’ Association in a bid to stop the violence, Hasluck said: “We have stuck to the letter of the truce we agreed with President Mugabe on 19 April that the violence would end. Instead, it is spiralling out of control and the violence against farm employees is growing.”

An occupation movement now out of control

Those occupying some of the farms had said they did not care what President Mugabe or Hunzvi said, they would remain, Hasluck said. He said he also doubted whether Hunzvi had complied with a court order two weeks ago that he call an end to the farm occupations.

“I don’t know the extent to which we are being led astray by Mr Hunzvi to saying these things and then the people occupying the farms are getting other instructions. It is a warlord-type situation with people saying, ‘we’ll take the farms and deal with this ourselves’. In one case at the weekend, a war veteran who is also a ZANU-PF member of parliament refused to meet with our delegation,” Hasluck said.

He said he had met earlier on Wednesday with a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who had expressed concern at the violence and human rights violations.

Hunzvi stands firm

Pressure for a deal has intensified since a third white farmer died on Monday after being beaten unconscious. But when asked by Reuters whether he had failed to honour an agreement to end the violence, Hunzvi stood firm.

“We are talking (with the farmers). Our message remains - give us our land,” he said. The veterans, who support Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, insist they are reclaiming land stolen from black Zimbabweans during British colonial rule. Earlier in the week he said people holding British passports should leave the country.

Militants have attacked farmers and farm workers and begun a campaign of intimidation of rural black voters ahead of parliamentary elections due this year in which Mugabe’s party faces the strongest opposition threat of his 20-year rule.

After a stormy three-hour meeting with farmers on Tuesday, Hunzvi said that the surrender of white-owned land to blacks was the key to ending the violence. “We are making progress, but our aim is to take our land. The farmers agree we must take some land back. We are going to give people the land,” he said.

No exodus of whites

Despite widely reported news that the British government is making contingency plans to assist the evacuation of the 20,000 British passport holders among the country’s 70,000 whites, Hasluck insisted that there had been no large scale move by whites to leave the country.

“We are Zimbabweans and we plan to stay. There is no exodus yet of white farmers,” he said.