Harare/Johannesburg - They arrived in the dead of Monday night - around 100 of them - outside a white-owned tobacco farm near the Zimbabwean capital Harare, kicking at the gate and singing Chimurenga (liberation war) songs.

The farmer, who cannot be identified for security reasons, knew four of their leaders. They were local men, he told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa by telephone.

"They said they didn't have a problem with me but that it had been directed from the top. They said all the white farmers will be asked to go."

The farmer was given until morning to evacuate his wife and four kids. "I asked them if we could continue grading the tobacco crop that is in the barn. They said they thought so but that they'd have to ask."

Zimbabwe's few remaining white farmers - estimated at around 300, down from around 4,500 eight years ago - are under attack.

In scenes harkening back to 2000 when President Robert Mugabe encouraged war veterans (mostly ruling party youth militia) to seize white-owned commercial farms his henchmen are on the march again.

The trigger then as now was an electoral defeat. White farmers - mostly supporters of Mugabe's rival opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai - were scapegoated for Mugabe's defeat in a referendum on a draft constitution that would have significantly boosted his powers. Dozens of white farmers and black farm workers were killed in the ensuing land grabs.

Now they are being hung out to dry for his Zanu-PF party's defeat in March 29 parliamentary elections and his apparent second-place finish behind Tsvangirai in concomitant presidential elections.

The results of the presidential vote have yet to be announced but an independent estimate by an election NGO showed Mugabe taking under 42 per cent of votes to Tsvangirai's 49 per cent.

The election was "a way to reopen the invasion of Zimbabwe by the whites," the head of the Mugabe-loyal War Veterans Association said Friday, accusing white farmers of conspiring with the opposition to retake their farms from blacks.

"The MDC (Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change) has made a monumental blunder provoking a vicious dog it had better left sleeping," Mugabe's information secretary George Charamba warned.

The invasions started on Saturday, in the same area as in February 2000, in the dusty farming town of Masvingo, where they took over three farms and a lodge.

By Monday the action had moved to Centenary in Mashonaland Central. By Monday afternoon sources there said the area had been emptied of white farmers and the total number of expropriated farmers nationwide were estimated at over 10.

"They are still here," a farm clerk said by telephone from a tobacco farm in Centenary. "They (the war veterans) are plenty. More than 30. They are beating drums and asking for food."

The farm owners and the farm manager had fled, but "we (workers) are also in trouble," he said.

"I'm making money under Mugabe but if they throw me off again I think I will leave," said another farmer who lost three farms since 2000 to Mugabe's brand of land reform and now breeds cattle and grows tobacco and seed maize on a leased farm of around 2,000 hectares.

Analysts say Mugabe's scaremongering about the "white menace" is all part of a ploy to claw back support for a runoff in rural areas once loyal to him where Tsvangirai took votes from him for this election.

"Sometimes the party creates enemies where real ones don't exist to keep itself going," South Africa's Business Day newspaper noted. "Now the perceived enemies are the farmers, whereas in the 1980s 'dissidents' had to be crushed in Matabeleland."

Among Mugabe's loyal supporters are some of the black subsistence farmers that benefited from land reform, which decimated commercial agriculture, wrecking the economy and causing widespread food shortages.

The MDC has denied plans to turn back the clock on land reform, saying it will only take back farms where the owner has more than one and accusing Mugabe of a planning a war against his own people.

So far the violence that characterized the 2000 land grabs has been absent. "They didn't treat us badly," the expropriated farmer in Harare said. "But I'm out of a job for now."(dpa)