Squatters kill policeman

By M.S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, APRIL. 5. A Zimbabwean policeman was shot dead yesterday by some black squatters on a white-owned farm near Marondera, about 70 km south-east of Harare.

According to a SABC radio news report this morning, the policeman was killed when he went to the farm to evict the squatters. The owner of the farm, Mr. Ian Kay, had been assaulted the previous day when he tried to pull down the shacks that the squatters had erected on a vacant homestead on his farm. An agency report from Marondera quotes the farmer as saying that the squatters had ``put up about 25 shacks and took over a vacant homestead as a base''.

This is the first reported incident where a life has been lost in the current tension in Zimbabwe between white farmers and veterans of the war of independence on the issue of land. In another incident this morning at Mvurwi, about 80 km north of Harare, a petrol bomb was thrown into a workshop belonging to a supporter of the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party that is spearheading the current movement against the Government and hoping to mount a successful challenge to the ZANU-PF in the forthcoming elections. No one was injured in the incident.

With elections due soon, the political temperature is only bound to rise. Violence marked the demonstration organised by the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) in Harare on Saturday, though the reporting of the violence seems to have been marked by an overkill. According to a report in Zimbabwe Standard, a paper which like most other newspapers barring the Government-owned Herald is hostile to the ZANU-PF government and to the President, Mr. Robert Mugabe in particular, ``eight people, most of them Saturday shoppers, were injured in the scuffle''.

Central to the current tensions in Zimbabwe is the issue of land. However, the issue is complicated by political rhetoric and plain disinformation. Two instances will suffice. Almost without exception, one is told that the rejected Constitution provided for confiscation of white-owned farm land ``without compensation''. This is plainly not the case. One can question the provisions of Article 57 of the now rejected Draft Constitution which ``contextualised'' the compensation by referring to the history of the dispossession of indigenous people by colonial settlers, who either literally ``staked'' their claims or secured vast settlements at the rate of a few shillings; and its reference to the ``effective repudiation'' by the former colonial power, Britain, of independent Zimbabwe's ``just claims'' for reparations. But one cannot say that these provisions amount to ``confiscation without compensation''. Secondly, the use almost without exception to describe what is, in fact, illegal squatting as ``land invasions'' investing the exercise with forethought and preparation and a sustained strategic vision it does not possess.

Indeed, even the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers' Union, representing the white farmers has cautioned against such hype, in particular the moves by Britain to paint Mr. Mugabe into a corner and mobilise European Union support for ``international sanctions'' against Zimbabwe, with the expectation that this will assist the opposition to win the forthcoming elections.

Thus, the face-off and exchange of insults earlier this week between the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Robin Cook and Mr Mugabe in Cairo during the Africa-E.U. summit. Though Mr. Cook claimed that his 45-minute meeting with Mr. Mugabe on Monday had been ``constructive'', the issues dividing the two countries will not disappear. Indeed, under the so-called New Labour, colonial perceptions of Africa seem to have acquired a new lease of life even though direct colonialism is now simply a matter of history. The former South African President, Mr. Nelson Mandela perhaps had such reconstructed new imperial arrogance in mind, when in his interview to The Guardian in London today, he criticised Britain (and the United States) for assuming the role of ``world policemen''.

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Section  : International
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