Ben Freeth briefly detained by police after visiting Mount Carmel

Ben Freeth was detained for a short time this morning after a visit to his burnt out homestead on Mount Carmel farm. Freeth arrived at the farm with an Aljazeera film crew, when two armed plain-clothed individuals leapt out of the bush and forced him to drive to Chegutu police station. The Aljazeera team did not film the incident and instead returned to Harare.

According to the police he is forbidden from filming his farm and needs to get permission from Provincial Government Headquarters to do any filming as the farm is now under “police surveillance”.

Freeth was advised that the farm was under surveillance because an arms cache had been found. Please see our blog post from last week where we anticipated this would happen.

The police released Freeth after the warning.

Today’s occurrence is the next stage in the harassment of the Freeth family. It has to be noted that the police vigilance in relation to the so-called ‘arms cache’ is at odds with their total lack of interest in real crime on the farm. A significant quantity of fertiliser was stolen from Mount Carmel last week and when the Freeths attempted to follow up on the police docket, they were told there was no case as it was “all lies”.

Mugabe, addressing Zanu Youth on Friday last week, said

“There is no reversal of the land reform programme at all,” Mugabe said.

“The land reform exercise is irreversible. Those who have sought relief from outside Zimbabwe should know that land acquisition is through legal means and for that reason, the noises they make will simply frustrate them more,” (AFP)

Morgan Tsvangirai, at his party’s 10th anniversary celebrations made his first directly ciritcal comments on the Zanu PF party’s approach to land reform:

“I am not going to stand by while Zanu-PF continues to violate the law, persecutes our members of parliament, spreads the language of hate, invades our productive farms, ignores our international treaties,” he said.

“We want partners that are sincere. We want partners who are going to commit themselves to good governance principles. We cannot have partners of looters.” (Aljazeera)

Update on Friedewal Farm:

In the meanwhile, Louis Fick, farming at Friedewal Farm in Chegutu is still trying to ensure that the livestock on his farm his fed and taken care of. He was allowed to feed the pigs yesterday, and was told that they could pipe in water today. However, the pieline is broken and the workers on Friedewal Farm have been told they cannot repair it. The Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabbwe is used the distressed animals as leverage to force Fick to go out to the farm and submit to pressure to hand over the pig pens in dispute. Please note that we have updated our action alert here with one extra number to call or sms – please TAKE ACTION.

This entry was posted by Sokwanele on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 3:19 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.