Aug 22, 2002 4 min read

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) – After his arrest for defying a government eviction order, white farmer Roy Fuller, 60, salvaged his family photographs and valuables and left his home of 36 years. “I am bitter, but its more out of sadness than anger. We’re not staying. It’s quite a relief to know its over now,” he said Wednesday as he joined dozens of fellow white farmers forced off their land and began making plans to move to neighboring South Africa to work on a vineyard.

The government’s campaign to take over white-owned farms has added to more than two years of political chaos and disrupted food production. The seizures, along with a drought, have caused widespread food shortages that relief groups say threaten half of Zimbabwe’s 12.5 million people.

Fuller, ordered by a local court to abandon his 2,900-acre farm in the corn, beef and tobacco district of Selous, 45 miles west of Harare, left tobacco worth $60,000, 130 head of beef and dairy cattle and 70 black workers and their families to a gloomy fate.

The workers, who continued to sort and grade tobacco Wednesday, will eventually have to leave, Fuller said. Local officials asked him to pay them severance packages.

His cattle were being moved to a neighbor’s land. “They will have to be sold or slaughtered; there isn’t enough grazing for them there,” he said.

Fuller was evicted from his farm under a chaotic land redistribution plan the government says will right colonial-era imbalances that left 4,500 whites with a third of Zimbabwe’s farmland and 7 million blacks with the rest.

The government has targeted 95 percent of white-owned land for redistribution.

In the first mass wave of evictions Aug. 8, about 2,900 farmers were ordered off their land, but 60 percent refused to comply, according to Justice for Agriculture, a farmers support group.

Nearly 200 of them were arrested in the past week. The farmers, many contesting the legality of their eviction orders, face up to two years in jail and a fine.

Farmers’ lawyers believe the eviction orders violate their constitutional rights of ownership and freedom from racial discrimination and also contain technical errors making them invalid.

Despite government promises, Fuller received no compensation for his farm, which is valued at about $1.2 million.

Fuller, scheduled to return to court Aug. 30, said he will demand compensation, but will not fight for the return of the farm where his three children grew up.

.”The emotional loss, the despair is enormous. Some guys may be a lot stronger than me, but I’ve had enough. My mind is made up,” he said, recalling threats and intimidation from ruling party militants who occupied part of his land the past two years. “We tried to coexist and cooperate but it didn’t work.”

On Tuesday, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa urged black settlers allocated land on contested farms to move onto them and begin preparing for the end-of-year rainy season, despite the court challenges. New farmers should not be hindered by white efforts to block land redistribution, he said.

That statement and bail terms that forbid many arrested farmers from living on their land while awaiting trial disturbed many farmers.

The bail conditions are “a prejudgment of the validity” of eviction orders, said David Hasluck, director of the Commercial Farmers Union, representing the nation’s white farmers.

Though Zimbabwe faces a food shortage, farmers are being forced to abandon crops, including irrigated wheat, that need constant attention, Hasluck said.

“By the time they go to court throughout September, the crops will be dead, exacerbating an already critical food situation,” he said.

In the Karoi and Chinhoyi districts northwest of Harare, union officials said some farmers received police permission to tend their crops during the day but had to stay with neighbors at night.

Others were trying to “farm by phone” with the help of unaffected neighbors, managers and workers, said David Rockingham Gill, a union official in Chinhoyi.

Filled with despair, Fuller was unwilling to try such machinations. Instead, he remembered the troubled times of his youth, when he and his missionary parents fled war in the Congo in 1962 with their belongings in suitcases.

“That experience keeps coming back to haunt me,” he said. “It’s happening again.”