Harare – The 75-year-old wife of a farmer on a smallholding in central Zimbabwe has been murdered in the fourth recent killing of whites on isolated holdings as violence on beleaguered white farms continues, relatives said Sunday. South African-born Sophie Hart was alone on their
plot in the Kadoma district 150 kilometres west of Harare when her husband went at midday to watch a rugby match on a neighbour’s television, said Eben de Toit, a relative by marriage of the couple.

Jan Hart, 79, come home before sunset to find his wife bound hand and foot and apparently strangled.

Du Toit said: “I think it was a robbery that turned into an ugly scene. The place was in a mess, with all the drawers turned out. Not much was missing, so I think they were after cash.”

The three previous murders all happened since the inauguration of the coalition government between President Robert Mugabe and pro- democracy prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

Violent seizures of the remaining 300 white farms have since continued unabated, as Mugabe insists that his lawless revolutionary land reform programme since 2000 is irreversible. About 4 000 farmers have been forced off their land, farm union officials say.

Another elderly farmer from the Karoi area 200 kilometres north of Harare is still in a critical condition in a hospital after being attacked earlier this month.

Elderly farmers still on their land have been soft targets all along, said John Worsely-Worswick, director of Justice for Agriculture, a lobby group for dispossessed white farmers.

“It doesn’t matter if we pull back, to smallholdings. We are political fair game,” he said. “The perpetrators think there’s a good chance they will get off or the cases will not be properly investigated. It’s demoralising for the community.

South African president Jacob Zuma was in Harare last week to mediate in disputes between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and made clear he backed Tsvangirai’s insistence that Mugabe had failed to meet his obligations to restore democratic reforms.

Observers said he also delivered an implied rebuke to Mugabe over the continuing lawlessness on white farms when he said that the six- month-old coalition government should ensure all productivity on all agricultural land.

Once a thriving agricultural producer that exported surplus food to famine-stricken African nations, Zimbabwe’s farm industry has crashed since the land invasions began and the United Nations 2.8 million people will need food aid to survive.

Earth Times