Despite three separate agreements aimed at resolving Zimbabwe's land crisis, three people have died during the last week as violence in the countryside rages unchecked.
The latest deaths came Saturday, when two people died during a clash on a white-owned farm in eastern Zimbabwe and an octagenarian farmer was charged with inciting the violence and as an accessory to murder, farming officials said Sunday.
The farmer, John Bibby, said he locked himself inside his home throughout the clash on his farm. His security guards said the two men died after falling from a truck and getting run over by the government supporters who were ferrying them from farm to farm.
The deaths on Bita Farm in the rural district of Hwedza, 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Harare, came as pro-government militants burned the homes of farm employees and the farm's office complex, an official at the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) told AFP.
CFU officials said both those killed appeared to be among the young pro-government militants who were being ferried by truck among different farms around Hwedza.
Those deaths followed the beating death of a primary school headmaster on Tuesday in the central town of Chivhu, part of a district where a parliamentary by-election is set for September 22-23.
The headmaster, Felix Mazava, was a supporter of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and party officials are convinced that his killing was politically motivated.
Police said Mazava's death was likely either a political killing or a lovers' quarrel.
The deaths are part of the violence that continues nationwide, despite three separate deals reached during the last two weeks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe's political crisis.
Under the first agreement, reached September 5 with white Zimbabwean farmers, the government accepted an offer of nearly nearly one million hectares (2.4 million acres) of land and substantial financing for resettled farmers.
Although the government agreed to nothing in return, farming officials see that deal as their best hope for ending 18 months of violence on their land.
The next day, Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge agreed at Commonwealth talks in Nigeria that the government would crackdown on farm violence in exchange for British financing of land reforms.
That meeting was followed by a regional summit Monday and Tuesday in Harare, where regional leaders backed the dealed reached in Abuja and said Mugabe had assured them that he would crack down on violence and intimidation.
The summit ended with no concrete agreement, but did force Mugabe to meet with his chief critics -- including the opposition, church leaders, businesses and white farmers.
Mugabe has remained largely silent throughout the latest diplomatic developments. Although he endorsed the Abuja deal in principle, he has yet to officially sign it.
Farmers say they have yet to see any crackdown on the occupiers, who continue forcing work to a halt on farms and burning grazing land.
Pro-government veterans of Zimbabwe's 1970s liberation war launched a campaign of farm invasions in February 2000, claiming they were protesting the slow pace of land reform to redress colonial-era inequities.
The MDC says the farm invasions are a politically motivated scheme to punish its supporters and to seal off huge swathes of the countryside to prevent them from campaigning for the presidential election, due early next year -- HARARE (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
