July 2001 Africa News Headlines

Monday, July 16, 2001 - Web posted at 10:49:40 GMT

Zimbabwe white farmer accused of killing black man

HARARE - A white Zimbabwean farmer has been arrested in connection with the death of a black man who received land on the farmer's property under a controversial government resettlement scheme, police said on Monday.

Philip Bezuidenhout allegedly ran over Phibian Mapenzauswa on Saturday and dragged him under his truck for 20 metres (yards) at the farm near Odzi in eastern Zimbabwe, Inspector Bothwell Mugariri told Reuters.

Mapenzauswa was among a group of black men who had gone to see their new plots on Bezuidenhout's farm, which had been targeted under a government programme to seize white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks.

The police would not give any more details because the case is due to go before the courts, Mugariri said.

Information Minister Jonathan Moyo condemned the alleged murder as racially-motivated, and said the government expected the "full wrath of the law" to take its course.

"This is a callous, premeditated, cold-blooded murder which smacks of the Ku Klux Klan-type of murders done in the United States and South Africa," Moyo told the state-owned Herald newspaper.

Zimbabwe has suffered an economic and political crisis since February last year when self-styled war veterans, encouraged by the state, seized hundreds of white-owned farms across the country.

The land chaos has sparked fears of food shortages and foreign donors have cut off aid in protest over the government's handling of the land issue.

The government plans to seize at least five million hectares (12 million acres) of the 12 million hectares (30 million acres) held by white farmers and has earmarked more than 5,000 farms for redistribution.

Mugabe, who has ruled the southern African country since independence from Britain in 1980, says 4,500 white farmers hold 70 percent of Zimbabwe's best land.

The government says it will compensate farmers for improvements only, not the land, which Mugabe says was "stolen" from blacks during the British colonial era. Nampa-Reuters

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