PEARSON FARM, Zimbabwe - On this farm of freshly plowed fields bordered by gum trees, just north of Harare, it should be the planting season.
The tractors, though, are quiet. The fields are empty of workers. Farm owner Robin Marshall is sipping coffee on his back porch and anxiously watching clouds drift across the wide African sky, like grains of sand through an hourglass. Each is a reminder that precious days are slipping away before the first rains fall this month.
If he tries to put one seed in the ground, he will be beaten up, maybe killed, he fears.
That's the threat from the several dozen squatters who invaded his farm this month with the government's backing.
On Nov. 4, a caravan of more than 50 trucks and cars wound its way up the gravel road to his front gate. Veterans of Zimbabwe's long war for independence of the 1970s, peasants, and government officials danced, sang, chanted and then held a brief ceremony to declare that Marshall's land was no longer his.
They offered no title deed. No court decision. No paperwork. It was more a case of mob rule, Marshall says.
"The law doesn't seem to mean an awful lot at the moment," Marshall says wryly.
Law or no, farm invasions like this are the centerpiece of President Robert Mugabe's often violent effort to correct the racial imbalance of land ownership in the country of 12 million.
It is a program pushing the country closer to disaster by undermining the nation's agriculture industry, the backbone of its already weak economy. Hundreds of commercial farmers find themselves unable to plant their crops and wonder what the future holds.
Land reform has been an emotional issue in Zimbabwe since the black majority overthrew white minority rule in 1980, after more than a decade of fighting.
During colonial times, white settlers who came to what was then called Rhodesia to seek their fortunes in agriculture and mining forced blacks off ancestral lands.
Today, whites make up less than 1 percent of the population, but they own about one-third of the nation's best farmland. About 4,500 white landowners farm about 28 million acres, while 1 million black peasant farmers share 40 million acres.
Mugabe intends to resettle about 12.5 million acres owned by white farmers with some 500,000 war veterans and peasants by the middle of next year. So far, more than 2000 farms have been resettled and staked out with no compensation to the owners.
In November, Zimbabwe's Supreme Court declared the land invasions illegal, but Mugabe's government has ignored orders to remove the occupiers from the land.
Although Mugabe insists he is trying to correct the wrongs of Zimbabwe's colonial past, opponents say the land reform program is Mugabe's desperate bid to stay in power as his popularity wanes and his country unravels.
About half of the nation's working population is unemployed, inflation has soared to 60 percent, fuel and power shortages are commonplace and families are struggling to feed themselves.
When his one-party government faced its first serious opposition in parliamentary elections this year, Mugabe tried to ignite racial division by urging his people to reclaim the land from the white farmers and for whites to pack their bags and head to Britain.
The strategy, opponents say, was to strike a blow at the white farmers who were supporting the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mugabe's land reform program "has nothing to do with maintaining the land. It has do with maintaining power," says Mike Auret, an opposition party leader.
War veterans and Mugabe supporters invaded 1,000 farms in the months leading up to the elections in June. Five white farmers were killed. The opposition movement then won a third of the seats in Parliament, a defeat for Mugabe's one-party government.
Marshall's farm was one of those taken over in April. About 300 people, who said they were veterans of Zimbabwe's war of independence, overran his property, built a bonfire in his back yard and spent several days banging on drums until Marshall agreed to leave.
Marshall moved to a neighbor's house. He waited three months, until after the election, when most of the veterans drifted away. Then he returned with armed guards.
The aim the land reform in Zimbabwe has been to develop a new class of independent black commercial farmers. But the land issue has been more political than economic.
Britain, the former colonial power, has put up $70 million to redistribute the land on a willing seller/willing buyer basis. Mugabe, however, has been accused of using the money to hand out land to political cronies and business people - not the peasant farmers.
At an international conference on land reform in Zimbabwe held in 1998, donors agreed to support legal, gradual land reform that would target the landless blacks. But Mugabe never acted on the offer.
Now Mugabe is trying to accomplish in a matter of months what he has failed to do during 20 years in office, critics say.
Under Mugabe's program, farmers will be allowed to care for the crops they have already planted. For Marshall, who planted 10 percent of his seed maize crops, that means that 90 percent of his land will be turned over to settlers. He will receive no compensation for his land, only money for the improvements on the land such as his house, barn and storage facilities.
As each day passes, Marshall says he is debating whether to ignore the threats of his occupiers and continue planting. "I think it might be worth the risk," he says, noting that all his savings are invested in his farm. Without it, he'll be destitute.
His land was invaded despite the fact that it met none of the criteria for land acquisition set by the state. And though he says he agrees that a gradual, legal land reform program is needed, he does not like to be lumped with white colonial farmers.
Marshall, whose father moved to Rhodesia in 1947, was born and raised in Zimbabwe but spent much of his life working as a farm manager saving to buy his own land. In 1990, he bought his farm with the government's blessing.
"We didn't steal the land from anyone. We paid the market price," he says.
Across the road from Marshall's farm, a group of about 20 war veterans and Mugabe supporters has been camped out at the local school. Some have been living there since the first farm invasion in April. Others arrived this month. They sleep in the classrooms at night and clear out during the day to allow classes to continue.
On a recent afternoon, the supporters sat on the school grounds by a fire keeping a watchful eye on Marshall's farm. The group refused to discuss the occupation with Marshall or with visitors. When a visitor asked to speak with them, a middle-aged woman reached for a steel pole and said she would not answer any questions.
The government defends its approach as being one of the country's own devising rather than a plan imposed by international agencies. It also asserts that most accounts of violence have been exaggerated by white farmers, and that police have matters well in hand.
"If war veterans do interfere with operations on a farm, the farm must lodge a complaint," says George Charamba, one of Mugabe's spokesmen.
Marshall said he has called the police and they have offered little protection. They had advised him to avoid confrontations with the land occupiers at the risk of otherwise being killed.
Gerry Davison, a spokesman for the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents about 4,500 farms, says he handles dozens of reports of farm violence and threats from occupiers each week.
On a recent morning he received a call from a farmer who was stopped from plowing. The farm invaders forced the farmer to stay on the tractor and then piled sticks and dry grass beneath his tractor and threatened to set it on fire if he did not agree to stop plowing.
Although the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring the invasions illegal was a major victory for the farmers, it is not expected to change much, Davison said:
"All we can do is stay within the law, whatever defense it offers. As long as the government is operating outside the law, the victories we win in court are hollow."
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