Mugabe warns against legal action

About 1,700 farms have been occupied

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has warned white farmers that they will be forced off their land if they persist with legal challenges against government plans to seize their farms and redistribute them to blacks.

He said: "I urge farmers to drop the nonsense of fighting the land issue in the courts, as that will make us even more angry.

"If the farmers cannot be harmonious, ... then we will ask them to leave our country harmoniously."

Olusegun Obasanjo, right, urged Mugabe to follow the law

The Zimbabwe Government has ignored a number of court orders to evict ruling party supporters who have illegally occupied about 1,700 white-owned farms since February in support of the redistribution programme.

Zimbabwe's highest court, the Supreme Court, has declared the government land resettlement programme illegal and the High Court has made two orders to end the often violent occupations.

'Irreversible'

On Thursday Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki also urged Mr Mugabe to follow the law.

What Zimbabwe should do is strictly follow the law that is already in place

Olusegun Obasanjo

Mr Mugabe says it is immoral that some 4,500 white farmers own about 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of the country's prime farming land while blacks, who form the majority of the 12.5 million population, are squeezed into arid areas.

He plans to seize about five million hectares of white-owned land for blacks.

Mr Obasanjo said: "What Zimbabwe should do is strictly follow the law that is already in place," he said, adding that the unrest and economic problems caused by the land issue could spill across borders.

He also said he had been asked to mediate between Mr Mugabe and Britain, the former colonial power, over compensation for white land owners - descendants of colonial era British settlers.

Economic crisis

The Zimbabwean government-owned paper the Sunday Mail reported that Mr Mugabe said Britain had given up its efforts to obstruct Zimbabwe's land reform programme.

"(Zimbabwe's) government is now moving on an irreversible course of acquiring land and redistributing it to the people across all the rural provinces," the paper quoted Mr Mugabe as saying.

Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, warned on Friday after talks with Mr Mugabe that donors would not finance reforms until laws were obeyed and violence stopped.

President Mugabe's critics say he is playing up the issue of land to divert attention from Zimbawe's economic crisis - the worst since independence in 1980.

Most foreign loans have been halted, and hard currency shortages have led to acute shortages of petrol.