- Scores of people were being held in police stations across
Zimbabwe last night as Robert Mugabe's regime fulfilled its promise to
enforce eviction orders against 2,900 farmers.
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- A Zimbabwean police spokesman said 147 white farmers
had been arrested in a weekend of raids that were both violent and arbitrary
with gangs of uniformed "officers" behaving like lawless thugs.
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- Driving around the countryside in police Land Rovers,
many of the "officers" were members of the Zanu-PF youth militia
who had been specially issued with the uniforms.
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- The militia has been responsible for some of the worst
acts of violence during Zimbabwe's land crisis over the last two years.
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- At least one farmer suffered head injuries and a broken
leg during his arrest despite having voluntarily left his property and
a number of women were seized and held in cells before being released without
charge.
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- The government appeared to target only farming communities
it saw as belligerent or uncooperative while leaving other white areas
largely untouched.
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- As with much of the land-acquisition process in Zimbabwe
over the last two years, the granting of bail to the arrested farmers was
piecemeal and illogical.
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- Dozens of farmers were charged with obstructing the law
and then released but in several cases the farmers were refused bail and
held in police cells.
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- The treatment of one elderly and infirm farmer from Matabeleland
was so brutal that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change claimed
it represented a clear breach of the United Nations' Convention against
Torture.
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- In Harare a leading political scientist, Professor Masipule
Sithole, described the targeting of the white farmers as a clear act of
racist thuggery.
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- "This whole exercise of evictions is racist and
cruel, and smacks of barbarism," he said. The human rights of the
farmers have been grossly overlooked in this exercise.
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- "I am depressed. It couldn't happen at a more inopportune
time when we are faced with devastating food shortages and here we are
stopping farming."
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- A 67-year-old farmer, Guy Coke-Norris, who recently had
a heart by-pass operation, was refused bail even though the prosecutor
in Mutare, eastern Zimbabwe, recommended his release on humanitarian grounds.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/
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