Another 2 white farmers killed in Zimbabwe

Two white farmers, an elderly man and his young daughter, died after being "brutally attacked" on their farm in northeast Zimbabwe, the latest violence that targeted the country's wealthy racial minority, a farmers' union said Friday. Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe (CFU), which represents the interests of Zimbabwe's remaining 1,300 white farmers, announced in a statement the passing away of Malcolm Francis and Catherine Francis who own a farm in Guruve district in Mashonaland Central province. They were attacked on the farm on an evening walk. An earlier report by local Daily News said Catherine was suspectedly gang-raped and police picked up knobkerries with metal heads and condoms at the murder scene. Malcom Francis, the father, was severely injured and died days after the crime. Police have not yet responded to press requests. Charles Taffs, president of CFU, said members of the union "condemn this cowardly attack on an elderly man and a young woman and its barbaric brutality in the strongest of terms." "In addition we are greatly troubled by the total silence from our authorities, as well as our leaders, around this event," Taffs said, adding that there are "many other murders and other atrocities" committed over the last 14 years during the land reform that are yet to be resolved and their perpetrators have yet to be identified and held to account. Zimbabwe's white farmers, numbered around 6,000 upon independence in 1980, were pillar of the robust agriculture sector then as they occupied nearly 40 percent of the country's prime farmland. The government carried out a "willing-buyer-willing-seller" scheme in the 1980s and 1990s to repurchase the land to be allocated to black Zimbabweans. But economic crisis in late 1990s crippled the exercise and gave birth to the controversial "fast- track land reform" program in 2000. Over the next few years, 3,500 white farmers were chased away from their farms. Violence was recorded during the process. Zimbabwe's relations with the West also deteriorated after the western nations came out to condemn the land reform as serious violation of human rights. But the government defends the land reform citing justice in taking back the land that originally belonged to black Zimbabweans.