ZIMBABWE: Armed youth militias chased some of Zimbabwe's last remaining white farmers from their land this week after the government cancelled title deeds for more than 4,000 white-owned farms.
Coffee farmer David Wilding-Davis and his South African farm manager Allan Warner were attacked on Wednesday by youths armed with iron bars and automatic weapons.
Mr Wilding-Davis said they were chased off the farm by members of the militia, who are known as the Green Bomber, after Mr Warner was beaten with an iron bar and shots were fired at them.
"Shots were fired and my farm manager was attacked with a steel pipe, resulting in him having to get 12 stitches," he said.
Another commercial farmer in the area, Gideon Mostert, who won a stay of execution through the courts earlier this year after the government tried to remove him from his land, said he had abandoned his farm following repeated threats.
Justice of Agriculture spokesman John Worsley told The Irish Times he was aware of a number of other cases involving white farmers who were being put "under pressure" to leave their agricultural holdings.
"We are aware of about a half-dozen cases this week where white farmers are being put under pressure to leave their land," he said.
The escalation in violence has coincided with the news that the government has cancelled the title deeds for more than 4,000 farm owners and confiscated the land.
While the majority of white farmers left their land following the state-sponsored land invasions that started in 2000, they clung to the hope the title deeds might allow them to reclaim their farms in the future.
However, state-owned newspaper the Herald reported yesterday the government was cancelling all the title deeds following the introduction of last month's constitutional amendments, which were recently signed into existence by President Robert Mugabe.
"There will be a mopping-up exercise with those farms who escaped the net being accounted for and gazetted for acquisition," the Herald reported government justice minister Patrick Chinamasa as saying.