South Africans held in Zimbabwe for violence?

By M.S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, AUG. 8. Three South African citizens are believed to be among the 26 white farmers arrested earlier this week by the police in Zimbabwe on charges of ``public violence''.

According to a report in today's The Citizen (Johannesburg), the arrested also included some British nationals.

This has however not been confirmed by the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria. In a radio interview this morning, South Africa's High Commissioner to Zimbabwe, Mr. Jerry Ndou, said that his office in Harare had received a report about the presence of South Africans among those arrested yesterday at Chinhoyi, north west of Harare. The arrested persons bore ``South African names'', but this did not necessarily mean that they were South African citizens, he said.

Strong emotions of ``kith and kin'' are a feature of the close relationship between the white farming communities of South Africa and Zimbabwe, going back to the days of the apartheid regime and the Rhodesian regime. The ``kith and kin'' feelings also find very strong resonance in Britain, reflected in the interest of the British media (duly echoed in the South African media) and Government in the Zimbabwe developments.

According to reports from Harare, the violence occurred following attempts by white farmers to resist occupation of white owned farms by the war veterans.

A white farmer, Ralph Corbett, injured earlier this week in the clashes between Zimbabwe war veterans and white farmers in the area, died yesterday. He is the ninth white farmer to die in the ongoing agrarian violence in Zimbabwe since February last year.

This is just one of the all too numerous indications that, inescapably, South Africa is getting more and more directly caught up in the ongoing incidents in Zimbabwe. A feature of the so-called land invasions that are going on in several areas in this country, including in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town where the search is for homestead land, is the frequency with which the Zimbabwe `model' is being cited by often plainly misled landless people desperate for a piece of land.

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Section  : International
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