This might help to explain South Africa's support for Mugabe

The Telegraph reports:

This is the tale of three South Africans, all worried by the same thing. It won't be on the G8 agenda at Gleneagles this week, and has gone largely unreported. Yet it may hold the key to South Africa's future wellbeing.

Two are farmers - one white and one black. The other is a white policeman who is struggling to keep the peace. All are fearful and angry at the growing threat of a war over land.

The slow pace of land reform is producing racial tensions and violence.

Countless white farmers have fled after a huge rise in farm attacks in the decade since the end of apartheid. As many as 1,700 white farmers have been killed, many with a brutality that has shocked the police investigating the cases. The farmers that remain are gripped by an epidemic of fear.

Mugabe supplies a model for what is happening in South Africa.

Men such as Mr Meintjes believe that the campaign against them is orchestrated by the ruling ANC government, whose purpose is to drive them off the land in a Zimbabwean-style land grab, albeit disguised by legal powers.

And Mugabe is popular among black South Africans who feel the whites had it coming.

Despite government promises, Mr Payete is furious at the slow pace of land reform. He drives out from his small house in the townships to what was once his family's land, now fenced off with razor wire.

A narrow passage allows him to visit the graves of his forebears. He backs Robert Mugabe's approach in Zimbabwe and wants whites to go somewhere else. "Mugabe is right. They kicked us off our land, that's why we fight," he says. "This was our farm, we did not steal it. They came at two in the morning, arrested me and told me I was not allowed to live on my farm." Despite this sense of injustice, policemen like Captain Manie Van Zyl think the motive for the farm attacks is more prosaic: pure greed. But if this is the motive then why the extreme violence?

Mbeki's government is sitting on a powder keg and trying the best it can to satisfy demands for land while keeping a lid on violence.

Anger is growing in the townships at the slow pace of land reform. The government promised 30 per cent of South African land would be in black ownership by the year 2015. But much less than five per cent has changed hands. At the current rate, it will take 60 years to process the backlog of existing claims. Even by that point, 70 per cent of land will remain in white hands. Frustrated claimants like Mr Payete want the government to seize property back on their behalf, but Trevor Manuel, the highly respected finance minister, is anxious to avoid any suggestion of a racially inspired land grab. That would drive both white farmers and their money out of the country, as in neighbouring Zimbabwe. So they stick to the principle of "willing seller / willing buyer" as the basis for change.

This also explains why Mbeki's brother is in London arguing for funds to support reforms that would result in widespread freehold tenure.

Read the whole thing here.

I fear that in a few years we might look back at Mugabe's purges as relatively mild compared to the bloodbath that is threatening to engulf South Africa. In this situation it is probably unrealistic to expect that Mbeki could move against Mugabe.