|
SA farmers evicted in Zim
10/04/2008 14:11 - (SA)
Pretoria - South Africa has expressed its concern about reports of farm invasions in Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwean Commercial Farmers' Union president Trevor Gifford met with South African diplomats in Harare last week explaining that farmers were again being evicted from their land by so-called war veterans, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said on Thursday.
"The problem here as he identified it is that most of the farmers are about to harvest their crops and as a result Zimbabwe is at risk of losing food worth millions of dollars," Pahad said.
He said South Africa had forwarded a diplomatic note to the Zimbabwean Ministry of Foreign Affairs after two South Africans were told to leave their property.
"(The note was) to plead for the protection of our farmers in Zimbabwe," Pahad said.
Militia loyal to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe have evicted about 60 farmers, including one black farmer, from their land, Gifford told DPA, estimating that by the weekend the number of families chased off their land would number "in the hundreds".
About 300 white farmers were still on the land in Zimbabwe before the weekend, down from about 4 500 eight years ago, when the war veterans began seizing land with Mugabe's assent, kick-starting the country's disastrous land reform programme.
|
News
