ShareThisJames Etheredge relaxes on his patio and surveys a bucolic scene of green lawns and orchards, where a peaceful river sparkles in the sunshine. But slowly, as he talks of the violence and destruction that surround him, the pastoral landscape emerges as something very different: A war zone.
On the river behind him, calmly fishing now, are the farm invaders, young thugs who wear the T-shirts of a prominent member of the long-ruling ZANU-PF political party.
They set up their camp at the entrance gate, where they nailed their posters to the farm buildings. "Our Land, Our Sovereignty," the posters say, bearing a large photo of President Robert Mugabe.
The thugs have repeatedly ordered Etheredge and his brother to surrender their 270-acre citrus farm, one of the biggest in Zimbabwe with 6,600 tons of fruit waiting to be harvested this month. So far the young invaders have refrained from violence, but there is a menace in their presence.
The assault on the citrus farm is just the latest in a fresh wave of invasions of the dwindling white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe, a last-ditch scramble for free land before the new coalition government can prohibit the practice. About 80 farms have been seized and at least 50 more are under siege, sparking a crisis inside the new government as Mugabe continues to defend the invasions.
Nine years ago, Zimbabwe had about 4,300 white-owned commercial farms. Today only about 300 remain, and many are reduced to small plots of land. Many of the invaded farms are sitting idle or neglected despite a desperate need for food in Zimbabwe, where three-quarters of the population is dependent on food aid from foreign donors.
"I'm not afraid," Etheredge says, gazing at the young men who invaded his land. "I've told these guys, 'If you come into my house, I will kill you.' "
He speaks of guns and death with the nonchalance of someone who has seen violence around him for years. "I killed a person in my house last March," he shrugs.
He keeps his guns under his bed these days. Until last June, his arsenal was locked in a safe. Then a gang of young men, led by a powerful senator from the ZANU-PF government, drove onto the farm and threatened to kill the Etheredges if they refused to leave.
The gang looted the farm and stole everything they could haul away, including tractors, stoves, refrigerators, freezers, furniture and even the curtains on the windows. Using a jackhammer, they blasted through a thick wall into the safe and took 14 guns. When the Etheredges tried to recover some of their looted property, they were clubbed.
Later the Etheredges fired shots in the air to recover a stolen tractor, a small part of their $5-million investment. One of the invasion leaders was a soldier from a nearby military camp, they say. "If we had found him, we would have killed him," James Etheredge says.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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