JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 93 ____________________________________________________________________ government ministers and MPs, including Ignatius Chombo, minister of local government, Philip Chiyangwa, businessman and recently-elected MP for Chinhoyi and Sabina Mugabe, Mugabe’s sister, visited a Chinhoyi farm urging invaders there to take over neighbouring farms. The following day, a mob of about 50 war veterans and invaders laid siege to the homestead on Liston Shiels Farm. Responding to a distress call over the local radio network from the farmer, Anthony Barkley, a convoy of white farmers forced their way through the mob. In the melee, five invaders and two farmers were seriously injured. The police eventually arrived and requested the white farmers to report to Chinhoyi police station to give statements. When they arrived at the police station they were arrested, charged with inciting ‘public violence.’ When the elderly father of one of the arrested men arrived at the police station to deliver a blanket to his son, he too was arrested. Five other whites who went to the police station to check on the welfare of their colleagues were also arrested and charged. The incident was seized on by the government to claim that white farmers had deliberately provoked the violence. ‘It’s true the farmers have been attacking people,’ the minister of home affairs, John Nkomo, said on state television. ‘It’s the farmers who have been unleashing this violence.’147 On the streets of Chinhoyi, Zanu-PF supporters retaliated against whites at random, assaulting shoppers and stoning cars. At the magistrate’s court a hostile crowd gathered, shouting abuse when 21 white farmers appeared for a bail hearing. They were held in prison for two weeks, their heads forcibly shaved, before bail was granted.” The accused persons were denied access to their lawyers on 6 August 2001, the date of their arrest, and when their lawyers arrived at the police station at about 10 am on 7 August they found the accused being paraded there for identification purposes. After some demur on the part of the police, the lawyers were allowed to watch the proceedings. As an identification parade, it was most irregular and disorganised, with a large and hostile crowd present and witnesses being called on to pick out accused throughout the day. Later the video record which the police took of the proceedings was alleged to have disappeared, and the photographs were never produced in court. One of the lawyers, Mr L. Chibwe, was threatened by a member of the crowd for