Norton, Zimbabwe (dpa) – The face of the black farm manager was impassive when he brought the message to Peter Ziegler and his wife, Junelee, as they were having tea on the verandah of their homestead.
“The war vets say they are going to make war on the farm this weekend,” he said. One of their shacks burnt down the night before and they were blaming Ziegler.
“They say they are going to phone their leaders to come with a lot of people.” Alarm is the Zieglers’ first reaction, followed by sudden deflation, and then practicality asserts itself.
“The kids will have to stay in town again,” said Junelee, 36. Her two teenage children are at boarding school, but usually home for weekends. “Mom and dad will have to go into town,” she added. Peter, 41, said he would take us to his fields via a side road for a photograph. “They won’t ambush us there,” he said.
“Making war” can mean anything from a mob armed with axes staging a noisy demonstration outside the front gate of the homestead of Fort Martin farm in the Norton district 100 kilometre west of Harare, or actual violence.
Five farmers have been severely assaulted by so called war veterans in the last month. Or nothing may happen. Whatever happens, the recent threat delivered cut the ground even further from under Ziegler’s feet.
After several weeks of intimidation he has been given illegal orders by President Robert Mugabe’s government to stop work on nine- tenths of his own meticulously-run farm that earned him the prestigious 2000 Zimbabwe tobacco grower of the year award.
Fort Martin, bought by Ziegler 10 years ago, is a victim of Mugabe’s “fast track resettlement programme”, one of scores of other white-owned properties declared to be “state land” by so-called resettlement committees made up of local administrators, soldiers, police, self-styled war veterans and secret police.
They carry no documents of legal authority, no maps and no plan for how people are to be resettled. Instead, they arrive with randomly chosen groups of people who are dumped on the land with no infrastructure, seed, chemicals or tools, and told to get on with planting a crop of maize.
Observers say Mugabe’s self-appointed mission “to bring the land to the people” has collapsed into anarchy as government officials try to carry out Mugabe’s orders to resettle unknown thousands of people on to 5 Million hectares of white-owned land by the start of the rainy season.
Fort Martin is named after a fort built on the farm in 1897 by colonial military authorities, and where they crushed a chief rebelling against white occupation. But the current unrest has less to do with colonial history than with settling recent scores, says Ziegler.
In 1993 he was a member of the district’s local government council and made enemies for exposing senior officials of the ruling ZANU(PF) party in Norton for stealing council funds. Then the threats to seize his farm began. “They’re gunning for me,” he said.
In October the Norton district administrator, escorted by four policemen, four soldiers, war veterans and secret police arrived to “fast-track” his farm. About 28 families were parcelled out plots. Ziegler was told he could continue tending his 18 hectares of already hip-high early planted tobacco.
The remaining 200 acres of land he had just ploughed and fertilised was to be given to the “settlers,” he was told. He tried to tell the administrator that his actions were illegal. “I didn’t get halfway through, and they started shouting at me, they told me to ‘go back to Britain’ (he was born here of Swiss parents). I was manhandled. I jumped into my vehicle and gapped it,” he said.
He decided to ignore the DA’s orders and carried on planting. Four days later eight uniformed air force officers and another 15 secret police in dark glasses turned up. They refused to identify themselves but were led by a man addressed as “wing commander.”
“He said if I continued planting, he would come back and sort me out. He said they would come back and chop out my tobacco. He asked me, what do you do with a naughty child? You beat it, he said.” Ziegler submitted.
An air force helicopter was despatched to check that he had complied. It hovered over his lands and swept off.
“I’m a cash farmer, I can survive this year on just a small crop. But the future? I haven’t even thought about it. I’m probably in a bit of denial at the moment. “I can handle things until it gets totally untenable to live here and my life is in threat. If it gets to that, I will be out of here so bloody fast,” said Ziegler.
