Zimbabwe's whites fear vote will change little

By Cris Chinaka

HARARE (Reuters) - Like many white Zimbabweans, James Douglas wonders if he will still be a political punching bag for President Robert Mugabe after Saturday's election.

Mugabe faces his biggest challenge in nearly three decades of rule in the March 29 polls. The defection of two senior officials from his ruling ZANU-PF party has raised hopes among his opponents of political and economic change.

But these hopes are not shared by Douglas and other whites, who lost power with independence from Britain in 1980 and who feel like political scapegoats in a country whose leader regularly decries Western conspiracies and interference.

"If the elections were going to be fair, I don't think the outcome would be in any doubt. But I don't think that will be the case and people are expecting more of the same," said Douglas, whose 200-hectare farm was seized as part of Mugabe's controversial land reforms.

The 54-year-old was uneasy during the interview, tapping the coffee table and scanning the outdoor cafe for eavesdroppers, always a concern in a country where human rights groups say abuses are common.

"I am very uncomfortable with this whole subject," he said. "I don't like talking about our problems in isolation because that is what the politicians are trying to do, to pin a special tag on us as whites."

Zimbabwe's white population, estimated to have shrunk to about 40,000 out of a total population for Zimbabwe of around 13 million, has kept a low political profile since 2000 when Mugabe started seizing white-owned commercial farms for landless blacks with little or no experience in agriculture.

A dozen white farmers were shot dead and many others were beaten and driven from their homes. About 3,800 of the country's 4,500 white commercial farmers lost their land.

Critics say the controversial land policy has plunged the southern African country -- once a food exporter -- into a severe economic crisis marked by food and fuel shortages and the highest inflation in the world, at above 100,000 percent.

Mugabe, 84, says the seizures are part of an ambitious black empowerment drive and seek to correct colonial injustices that left 70 percent of the best farmland in the hands of whites.

He blames Zimbabwe's economic woes on sanctions imposed by the West as punishment for his land reforms.

"SCAPEGOATS"

Whites are used to insults and threats from his ZANU-PF party, which accuses them of working with the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

"I think people have come to accept that they (whites) are a convenient scapegoat, and while they are not comfortable with it, many white people have come to expect it," said a white journalist who asked not to be named.

"You shrug and say, 'there he goes again.' But you take comfort from the fact that race relations are generally cordial and that outside a few politically motivated attacks, you are not in danger of suffering any violence from other Zimbabweans."