THE grim reality of Zimbabwe’s postelection violence as President Robert Mugabe clung to power was hammered home last week when an elderly white farmer was abducted by so-called “war veterans” who tried to lynch him.

“He had a real hard time. He was handcuffed. Someone tried to strangle him with wire,” said Trevor Gifford, president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU), whose own property was seized by militants during a week of violent attacks on white-owned farms.

The farms of at least two black farmers were also targeted by Mugabe militants, apparently because they were thought to support the opposition. Scores of workers’ homes were burnt down on one of them, Silver-stream, as Mugabe’s thugs set about bludgeoning opposition voters into submission after results from a polling station set up on the farm showed they had voted against their 84-year-old ruler in elections two weeks ago.

Gifford, 40, said the name of the abducted white farmer was being withheld at the request of the British embassy, pending contact with his daughter in Britain. He is 76 and has a British wife. His ordeal began on Thursday morning when he was attacked by war veterans lying in wait to ambush him. They had chopped down trees and laid the trunks across the road.

When the truck stopped they punctured the tyres, dragged the farmer out, cuffed his hands behind his back and drove him away in another vehicle.

At one point one of the war veterans put a wire noose round his neck and began to strangle him. He stopped before it was too late. Meanwhile, the police had been alerted and managed to persuade the war veterans to release their prisoner. It took a long time: they freed him only after six terrifying hours.

Yesterday the farmer was recovering at his home in Chipinge about 220 miles southeast of Harare. Gifford said that he was “shaken” but well enough to speak to the authorities about his ordeal.

The incident echoed the gruesome murders that marked the first seizure of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe eight years ago. That government-backed campaign followed Mugabe’s unexpected defeat in a referendum to entrench his presidential powers and saw nearly 4,000 white farmers eventually deprived of their land, homes and livelihood.

Last week, just as he had done in 2000, Mugabe was waging a fresh antiwhite scare campaign, mobilising militants against the few hundred remaining white farmers and reviving resentment of them to drum up support for him in a presidential run-off.

Far from being a lame-duck leader who has lost his parliamentary majority and failed to secure his sixth term as president, Mugabe and his stalwarts were digging in to stay in power.

He seemed determined to win a forced run-off with Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) who, if unofficial estimates of the undeclared March 29 election results are correct, defeated him with just over 50% per cent of the vote. Mugabe is believed to have won about 43%, with the remainder going to Simba Makoni, his former finance minister.

Although outwardly calm, the country is on a knife-edge as it awaits fresh developments. Mugabe’s personal security has been reinforced. Troops and riot police are on standby. According to Amnesty International, the regime recently spent £1m in scarce foreign currency to import tear gas and other antiriot materials from China and Israel.

One insider’s report listed 200 names of senior army and intelligence officers who would lead Mugabe’s run-off campaign in the 10 provinces. They would direct paramilitary units of war veterans and a youth brigade to intimidate the rural population into voting for Mugabe next time.

Mugabe’s lieutenants have selected the emotive theme of land as the reason why he should stay in power, claiming that he and his Zanu-PF party are defending the resettled farm-land from the displaced white farmers who are preparing to return if the MDC takes power. The whites deny this; many have rebuilt their lives abroad.

Gifford has spent a frantic week trying to help his fellow farmers cope with their own invasions. At least 60 have been driven from their land in seven areas. In one of the worst affected, Centenary, a prime tobacco-growing area north of Harare, 15 farms were invaded by gangs of war veterans. They were mostly far too young to have fought in the independence struggle but were armed with sticks and machetes and fuelled with alcohol as they forced the owners to flee.

The crisis has left Gifford little time to dwell on his own predicament. Early in the week a mob of 30 men wearing Zanu-PF T-shirts arrived at the gate of his farm, also at Chipinge, to take it over. Late that night he received a telephone call from a man calling himself “son of the soil” who told him that from now on they would be managing the farm and he was never to return.

Gifford is used to invasions having endured several before. He has seen his coffee, macada-mia and avocado plantations damaged or destroyed, so there was not much more left for the militants to take away last week. But he remained determined not to lose it all without a fight – the farm has been in the family since his great-grandfather, Alfred Samuel Gifford, founded it in 1894.

The strain of the week’s events could be seen on the tanned but anxious faces of some of those driven off their land as they gathered at CFU headquarters on Thursday evening to hear Deon Theron, the union’s vice-presi-dent, urge them to stand together. Theron is the first Zim-babwean farmer to be convicted by the courts of resisting eviction so he has a lot of credibility in the tough farming community.

His long and acrimonious legal battle to stop an influential Zanu-PF official stealing his farm at Beatrice with its 700 cattle, 150 sheep and 30 breeding crocodiles is still going on. But already for his defiance he has received a suspended prison sentence and has been ordered to vacate the farm by April 27.

“I do not know what is going to happen,” he said. “I told the court that I loved this country and its people. I do not want to farm anywhere else. They saw that as defiance but I see it as patriotism, wanting to produce food for the nation.”

Reports from the occupied Centenary farms said that a series of police interventions had calmed the violence down yesterday. But some farmers had been warned in text messages from their staff that it was too dangerous to go back.

They found the inactivity galling, emphasising how impotent they felt about protecting their black staff. “While we are sitting in Harare complaining, Joseph [the black farmer on Silver-stream] has been left with nothing. The huts and what little possessions his staff had have been destroyed,” said a farmer using the pseudonym Brian Smith.

He was evicted last Monday and his children forced to run the gauntlet of “drunken war veterans” baying for blood. Yet he longs to go back to his land.

“I am like a tractor,” he said. “You can park me in the shade and I will go rusty. But give me a piece of land and I will cultivate it and grow crops. That is my gift from God. The politicians are creating the turmoil. Without them we would all get along together, black and white.”

Video: Zimbabwe's Opposition says Mugabe stepping up intimidation

Video: Zimbabwe opposition's grim warning

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