Land Grab.(South Africa)

Thousands of poor south Africans stood quietly for hours, some for days, in mile-long queues along a road leading to dusty fields in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg. Where the queue began, local activists were "selling" tiny plots of land they didn't own for the equivalent of $3. Those who arrived early erected shacks, transforming the fields into a shantytown. The new residents were there to tell a government they twice elected with a massive majority that the landless are running out of patience. We are here because we are struggling," Ribbi Chokoe, 30, told news reporters. He purchased an illegal plot and planned to build a house.

One of South Africa's worst nightmares is looking more likely by the day: orchestrated, Zimbabwe-style land invasions. Last week's invasions marked a significant escalation in the campaign by militant activists to mobilize hundreds of thousands of landless blacks against the disproportionately white land-owning class. The occupation was organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a tiny black- consciousness party that terrified whites during apartheid with the slogan "one settler, one bullet," and is now gathering political capital by offering practical help to would-be invaders. Government officials downplayed the problem, but their concern was hard to hide. Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza warned that people illegally occupying land would be dealt with "ruthlessly," and sought an urgent court order to evict the squatters. By Thursday more than 200 squatters were hauled off to jail. The "government will not tolerate Zimbabwean-type land grabs at any time," Didiza told the media, adding that "this type of action can seriously damage the economy." On cue, the South African rand slid to a record low of 8.2 against the U.S. dollar.

There's reason to worry. From the advent of democracy in 1994, tensions over land have been at a slow boil. An estimated 3.5 million black South Africans were kicked off their property during the dark days of apartheid, many with brutal force. Yet any massive and instantaneous land redistribution would almost certainly result in white flight and wreak irreparable havoc on the economy. So the ruling African National Congress (ANC) sought to strike a delicate balance. During the negotiations that ended nearly 50 years of white rule, leaders of the ANC agreed to constitutional protections for land ownership. Provisions were also made for an aggressive land-reform program that would address the grievances of those who lost property. Those reforms included neutral arbiters of land claims, buyouts of landowners and giving state-owned property to the poor and dispossessed.

In recent months, South African leaders have pointed to the reforms and dismissed comparisons to neighboring Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has orchestrated the mass invasion of white-owned farms by bands of liberation "war veterans." "Land invasions," President Thabo Mbeki stressed, "will never happen here."

But dealing with land claims has proved a massive task. The Land Claims Commission, set up to address apartheid-era wrongs, is hopelessly overburdened. Between 1995 and June 1999, the commission resolved a mere 41 of nearly 69,000 claims. As tension has ratcheted up, the commission has picked up the pace, resolving 12,314 cases in the past 18 months. That's still fewer than one in five of all claims.

The situation is ripe for radicalization. A survey last year found that 54 percent of black South Africans supported the land grabs in Zimbabwe. Now, across the country, activists have begun to defy Pretoria. In Mangete in KwaZulu-Natal province, 5,000 squatters recently invaded sugar farms. Crops have been burned, and the local church has been attacked. In the upmarket suburb of Kloof outside Durban recently, a network of activist groups orchestrated a mass invasion by some 1,000 squatters on a ...