Mugabe militants target whites farmers

By ANGUS SHAW, Associated Press Writer 35 minutes ago

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Militant supporters of President Robert Mugabe targeted whites Monday, forcing about a dozen ranchers and farmers off their land as Zimbabwe's longtime ruler fanned racial tensions amid fears he will turn to violence to hold on to power.

Mugabe's opponents pressed a lawsuit seeking to compel the publication of results of the March 29 presidential election that they say Morgan Tsvangirai won.

The opposition leader urged the international community to persuade Mugabe to step down.

"Major powers here, such as South Africa, the U.S. and Britain, must act to remove the white-knuckle grip of Mugabe's suicidal reign and oblige him and his minions to retire," Tsvangirai wrote in Monday's edition of Britain's Guardian newspaper.

"How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths?" he asked.

Tsvangirai was in South Africa meeting with "important people" on Monday, said Tendai Biti, secretary-general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

He met with Jacob Zuma, president of the country's governing African National Congress, according to spokesman Jessie Duarte. Both Duarte and Biti declined to give details.

Zuma had been a critic of South African President Thabo Mbeki's policy of "quiet diplomacy" toward Zimbabwe. But when he was elected ANC leader, he voiced support for that policy. Mbeki, who mediated failed pre-election talks between Tsvangirai's and Mugabe's parties, was out of the country.

A Zimbabwe court postponed until Tuesday an expected ruling on an opposition petition demanding the release of the presidential election results. Mugabe's ruling party has called for a recount and a further delay in the release of results.

Police reported the arrests of five electoral officials on charges of tampering with election results, giving Mugabe some 4,993 votes fewer than were cast for him, the state-controlled Herald newspaper said Tuesday. The paper said the alleged fraud occurred in four districts.

After an increasingly authoritarian rule during 28 years in power, Mugabe has virtually conceded he did not win, and is already campaigning for an expected runoff against Tsvangirai on a platform of intimidation of his foes and exploitation of racial tensions.

During a talk at a funeral Sunday, the president urged Zimbabweans to defend land seized from white farmers in recent years, the state-controlled Herald newspaper said.

"This is our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites," Mugabe said, referring to whites by the pejorative Shona term "mabhunu," the Herald reported.

He spoke as militants began invading more white farms and demanding the owners leave. Such land seizures started in 2000 as Mugabe's response to his first defeat at the polls — a loss in a referendum on measures designed to entrench his presidential powers.

Commercial Farmers Union spokesman Mike Clark said at least 23 farms were invaded and the owners of about half of them were driven off their land. He said the farms were in at least seven areas across the country, saying land grabs had "become a national exercise now."

Police in some areas persuaded the invaders to leave, but elsewhere officers did not intervene, saying it was a political matter, Clark said.

Farmer Graham Richards said about 20 local veterans of the 1970s bush war against a white-minority government moved onto his Pa Nyanda game lodge in southern Masvingo late Saturday. "We were terrified," he said, but added that the invaders were not armed.

On Sunday, police arrived with a bus and took the intruders away, he said. Two leaders of the veterans came to the farm to apologize, saying what had happened was wrong, he said.

"I think they (police) put a stop to it for the time being, but I don't know what will happen tonight or tomorrow," Richards said.

Mugabe's land reform program was supposed to redistribute among poor blacks large commercial farms owned by about 4,500 whites that covered 80 percent of Zimbabwe's best land. Instead, he used the farms to extend his patronage system, giving them to ruling party leaders, security chiefs, relatives and friends.

Zimbabwe had been a major food exporter until then, but its agricultural sector collapsed and the economy started unraveling. Today, a third of Zimbabweans depend on international food handouts, and another third have fled abroad looking for work or political asylum.

Eighty percent of Zimbabwe's workers don't have jobs, and the country suffers chronic shortages of medicine, food, fuel, water and electricity as inflation blazes at 100,000 percent a year.

The elite that still lives in luxury has a vested interest in keeping Mugabe in power. He makes them rich with gifts of land, government contracts and business licenses.

Some also fear an opposition government could bring prosecutions of some Mugabe loyalists, such as security chiefs involved in the 1980s subjugation of the minority Ndebele tribe in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

Tsvangirai has expressed concerns Mugabe's regime will mobilize the armed forces, youth brigades and war veterans to terrorize voters into supporting the president in a runoff.

While government officials have sought to play down the worries about violence, Mugabe has been accused of winning previous elections through violence and intimidation, with dozens of his opponents killed during the 2002 and 2005 campaigns.

Mugabe has seen his popularity battered by the economic crisis.

Official results for parliamentary elections also held March 29 said Mugabe's ZANU-PF lost its majority in the 210-seat parliament for the first time since independence in 1980. Final results for the 60 elected seats in the Senate gave the ruling party and the opposition 30 each.

Unofficial tallies by independent monitors of presidential results posted at local polling stations indicate Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe — but fewer than the 50 percent plus one vote needed to avoid a runoff.

The law requires a runoff within 21 days of the election, but diplomats in Harare and at the United Nations have said Mugabe might order a 90-day delay to give security forces time to clamp down.

The government banned most foreign journalists from covering the election and barred Western observers.

A lawyer said Monday that an American reporter and one from Briton who were detained last week on charges of reporting illegally on the election had been released on bail of 300 million Zimbabwean dollars — about $6 at the black market rate or $10,000 at the official rate.

Lawyer Harrison Nkomo said the two journalists were not allowed to leave the country and were expected to appear in court Thursday, when he planned to argue they should not be tried because they did not commit a crime. The American, New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak, was moved to a clinic after injuring his back in a fall in his cell, Nkomo said.

Two South African journalists similarly charged were also granted bail Monday, but were not released because the ruling came too late for bail payments to be made, Nkomo said.