FEATHERSTONE, Zimbabwe (dpa) – With boxes of matches as their only weapons, President Robert Mugabe’s lawless militias have launched a new offensive against the country’s white farmers – engulfing huge areas of the countryside in flame.
In just over two weeks, about two-thirds of all grazing in the drier cattle-ranching regions that cover most of the country has been destroyed by fires raging across hundreds of thousands of hectares, often for days on end.Two people, believed to be the children of squatters, were burnt to death last week. There are widespread reports of animals dying in fires, including 57 young ostriches in the western disrict of Nyamandlovu this week.Fires are part of the natural cycle of the bush in the hot, dry months before the start of the rainy season, but there is no doubt that nearly all of it now is arson, says the Commercial Farmers’ Union.This year’s fires are three times worse than last year’s, which was the worst ever and coincided with the invasion of white-owned farms by state-driven squatters.“The effect on the cattle industry is catastrophic,” said CFU deputy director Jerry Grant. “There is wholesale destocking and slaughter because ranchers have nowhere to feed their cattle. “The national commercial herd is down to 1.2 million and it’s shrinking fast. We will never meet out European export quotas of 9,000 tonnes again,” he said.The district of Featherstone, about 100 kilometres south of Harare and one of the country’s major beef producing areas, is probably the worst hit, with 80 percent of all grazing gone up in smoke. Kilometre after kilometre along the district roads, the veld on either side is a sea of black, with small piles of white ash where trees smouldered away.“On some days it’s so bad, you can hardly see the sun,” said local farmers’ association chairman Les Mallet. “It’s as dark as it was during the solar eclipse in June.” The worst was a three-day conflagration that swept through an entire 33 000 ha ranch. Sometimes farmers faced with up to five fires breaking out in a day.Boetie O’Neill, 36, has managed to save two-thirds of his ranch, thanks to his home-made fire brigade – three tractor-drawn trailers, each carrying a 2 000 litre water bowser – that has doused scores of blazes on his own and his neighbours’ farms.But the fires in Featherstone are only a part of demoralising strategy of harassment, violence and intimidation against the farmers. The real name of the game is extortion. Last week the squatters on his ranch drove his animals out of the paddocks and on to the main tar road where they have no water and no grass, and stand the chance of being hit by a vehicle. Four new-born calves died in the heat. Police ignored calls for help.O’Neill asked the squatters what he should do with his cattle. The land now belonged to them, they said, but he could graze his animals on unburnt parts of the ranch. For a fee. On Friday last week, O’Neill, who in two years has almost doubled the carrying capacity of his pasture through revolutionary grazing techniques in the last two years, paid out Zimbabwe dollars 123 000 (2,200 dollars) for the right to graze his animals on his own land.“Then they caught me out,” he said. “First they said it was for six weeks until the middle of October. But after I had paid them, they moved the goalposts. They said it was only for seven days.” The paper chase doesn’t stop there. This week the squatters admitted to him that the money they raised went mostly on paying the roaming mobs of ruling party youths, Mugabe’s violent political troopers in the commercial farming areas.The daily wage of 500 Zimbabwe dollars a day is an enormous sum of money for unemployed youths lifted off the streets by ZANU(PF). In an ultimate irony, O’Neill is paying for the lawless thugs who make a misery of his life and those of his family and his 60 workers, 30 of whom he was forced recently to retrench.A new ultimatum came this week. He was told he had to get all his cattle off the ranch. He has to meet the squatters, war veterans and party youths on Sunday. “What they want is for us to pack our suitcases and leave them the cattle,” he said. “If the meeting doesn’t go well, I will slaughter everything. And I am not going anywhere.”
