Zimbabwean farm-grabbers leave after German threat to cut aid

Jul 13, 2010, 11:35 GMT

Harare - Dozens of supporters of President Robert Mugabe have left a German-owned property following threats that aid from Berlin would be cut off, a German embassy spokesman said Tuesday.

Observers said it is believed to be the first time that diplomatic pressure against Mugabe's administration had succeeded since he launched a revolutionary land reform programme in 2000, driving 4,500 white farming families off their property and setting off the collapse of the agriculture-based economy.

Three farms, owned by German citizen Heinrich von Pezold, which produce coffee, tea, fruit and timber in the Chipinge district in the south-east of the country were invaded by mobs in early June.

Although the farms are covered by a decade-old bilateral investment protection agreement, police refused to take action against the invaders.

The embassy then issued an angry protest to the government warning that a promised 20-million-dollar grant to the bankrupt government would not be sanctioned by the German parliament.

It had been quiet there for some days, said embassy spokesman Matthias Schumacher.

The youths had gone elsewhere, he said. It seemed to be a result of the diplomatic pressure.

Fears that the mobs would return with reinforcements and extract revenge on the workers had not been realized.

The local businessman who had hired the mob to take over the properties had appealed to senior administrators to help him force his way back onto von Pezold's farm, but had been rebuffed, Schumacher said.

Von Pezold is one of five coffee farmers left in the fertile Chipinge valley, while national production of coffee has fallen from 10 000 tonnes in 2002 to 300 this year.

Analysts say the statistics are a mirror of what has happened to the rest of the country's once thriving agricultural industry under Mugabe's programme of farm seizures.