A tiny court in a shabby farming town in Zimbabwe was the setting yesterday for a last despairing attempt to stop President Robert Mugabe from evicting the country's few surviving white landowners.

A new law about to pass parliament will, in effect, give the regime power in the next 90 days to dispossess the last few hundred white farmers who still cling to their land.

Two white farming families who have already received eviction letters appealed to the magistrates' court in Karoi to halt the orders.

If the Nel and Terblanche families lose the test case, there will be nothing in law to stop Mr Mugabe from eliminating the surviving white landowners.

Didymus Mutasa, the lands and security minister, is leading the final offensive. David Drury, the lawyer representing the two families, told the court that Mr Mutasa "has dragged my clients to court... in a futile bid to evict them".

He said the regime's application for the eviction of the Nel and Terblanche families was "incompetent, illegal and an abuse of all sorts of rules and all sorts of laws".

After the hearing, Daniel Nel, 44, who was a government-approved South African investor, asked: "I am a white African, so why must I go?" He said: "We are operating on about 20 per cent of the land we used to have, but we still produce many thousands of tonnes of crops, and do so with government loans. So why do they want us to go?"


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../04/wzim04.xml

Its very simple : The ruling Zanu pf party of Robert Mugabe does not consider whites to be african.