Tuesday May 9 7:26 AM ET

By Cris Chinaka

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's white farmers, denying reports of retaliation for the murder of a colleague, on Tuesday met black war veterans who have occupied hundreds of their farms but failed to win any assurance that violence would end.

Chenjerai Hunzvi, leader of liberation war veterans' who began seizing white farms in February, told Reuters after a three-hour meeting with farmers that the key to ending violence lay in the surrender of white-owned land to blacks.

``We are making progress, but our aim is to take our land. The farmers agree we must take some land back,'' he told Reuters.

Farmers coming out of the meeting in Marondera, southeast of the capital, said privately there had been no assurance from the war veterans that violence would end.

Commercial Farmers' Union negotiator Nick Swanepoel told Reuters: ``What we are telling them is that the violence must end. We cannot make any progress if it continues this way. Our interest is not politics, we are farmers.

``We consider we have made some progress,'' he said

Zimbabwe's political crisis took an ominous turn on Monday when black farm worker Charles Mlambo reported he had been beaten by white farmers and knew of a second man also attacked in apparent retaliation for fatal beating of a white farmer Alan Dunn by war veterans.

Mlambo told Reuters at a local hospital: ``I was going to the post office. These white people stopped their car near me. One asked me in Shona whether I knew Mr. Dunn, then the guy in the car reversed and knocked me down and they started stomping me with their boots.''

Speaking on condition that he was not named, a white farmer from Beatrice, where Dunn was fatally assaulted on Sunday, denied on Tuesday there was any revenge attack.

He said he saw a neighbor stop by the roadside to talk to Mlambo, who he said had given farmers a guarantee a week earlier that Dunn, a local opposition party official, would not be hurt.

Farmer Describes Incident

The farmer told Reuters his neighbor asked Mlambo about the promise and the subsequent killing.

``Charles ran away. We drove after him and rugby tackled him and we put him in the back of a pickup truck. At no time was he touched in my presence. He had no cuts, no bruises,'' he said.

President Robert Mugabe, 76 and in power for 20 years, has refused to condemn the illegal land grab and has said whites had brought the violence on themselves by resisting the seizure of land taken from blacks under British colonial rule.

But the deputy director of the CFU farmers union, Jerry Grant, said the land invasions were less about land than about efforts by Mugabe's ruling party to win parliamentary elections expected in June.

``I have said it before. This has nothing to do with farming. It's politics at its dirtiest,'' he told Reuters.

At least 19 people -- including three farmers, farm workers and opposition supporters -- have died during three months of farm invasions and associated political violence.

President Clinton said he was saddened by the violence and hoped order could be restored.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said on Tuesday the United States would not help to fund land reform in Zimbabwe until the government acted to end violence and restore law and order.

Washington and London were key donors in a land reform program agreed with Zimbabwe in 1998, but stalled when Mugabe awarded land to friends and political colleagues ahead of landless peasants.

``For its part the United States stands ready to help Zimbabwe achieve meaningful land reform, but we cannot and will not offer support in a climate of violence, lawlessness and intimidation,'' Talbott said at a meeting of the Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.

Britain, meanwhile, said it was very disturbed by the growing violence in its former colony.

Tuesday, May 9 8:13 PM SGT HARARE, May 9 (AFP) - Her face tearful and puffy and the sounds her husband being beaten to death still echoing in her head, Sherry Dunn, wife of slain Zimbabwean farmer Alan Dunn, Tuesday accused a well-known war veteran of being behind her husband's murder.

Speaking for the first time since Sunday's killing, Dunn, dressed in a red tracksuit and wearing running shoes, told a media conference at a luxury hotel here that despite the incident, she was determined to stay in Zimbabwe.

"My family are Zimbabweans," she said. "Alan left England and had been in Zimbabwe for longer than he lived in England. He loved Africa, he loved farming here. We will stay."

Without naming the official, Dunn said her 48-year-old husband had two years ago defeated him in rural council elections in the Beatrice district, just south of Harare, where their cattle farm, Maasplein, is situated.

"He has had a vendetta against Alan for a long time," she said.

Dunn was beaten unconscious by a group of men armed with iron bars and wooden clubs on Maasplein on Sunday afternoon.

He died later that night without regaining consciousness, becoming the third commercial farmer to be killed since self-styled war veterans began invading white-owned farms in February with the government's blessing.

Dunn said she had not seen her husband's attackers.

"I heard a lot of screaming and ran inside to tell the kids to hide," she said. While running with her three daughters to a cottage on the property, she heard the sounds her husband being beaten.

"I heard Alan shouting 'ouch, ouch'," she said. "That was all I heard."

She got on to the farming radio network and alerted other farmers in the area, who raced to her rescue. By then the assailants had fled.

Her daughters had been badly affected by the incident, particularly the youngest, Emma, 12, who kept "reminiscing over the sounds she heard."

The incident was clearly politically motivated and not the work of criminals as police are claiming, she said.

She confirmed that her husband had been a supporter of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which is posing a significant threat to Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF party, but he had not been "all that politically involved."

"It was sheer murder," she said.

She added that threats had been made against her husband in the past but declined to elaborate.

The family returned from a holiday in South Africa last Wednesday and, anxious about the threats and the tension in the area after a number of farms were invaded by veterans of Zimbabwe's 1970s war of liberation, Alan Dunn sought a meeting with the war veterans and local ZANU-PF officials.

That meeting took place on Friday, during which he was given the "all clear" to return to his farm, his widow said.

However, the official, who was later named by family friend Guy Watson-Smith as "Huntzi", had not been happy with the decision, had become angry and had "called Alan a liar before storming out of the meeting," Sherry Dunn said. She did not know what the argument had been about.

She believed the war veterans, who have invaded some 1,200 farms, were "out of control", adding that her husband should never have been targetted because "he would have given his shirt to anyone, no matter what their colour or race."

"He was a good man," she added tearfully.

Also at the media conference was Dunn's brother, John Riley, who pleaded for an end to violence against farmers.

"We need an undertaking from the war veterans that no more lives will be taken" he said.

By Buchizya Mseteka

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The United States will not help to fund land reform in Zimbabwe until the government acts to end violence and restore law and order, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said on Tuesday.

Talbott, in Africa for a regional meeting in Mozambique on Wednesday, also deplored conflicts across Africa, the world's poorest continent, pointing at renewed strife in Sierra Leone and a fragile peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Washington and London were key donors in a land reform program agreed with Zimbabwe in 1998, but which stalled when President Robert Mugabe awarded land to friends and political colleagues ahead of landless peasants.

``For its part the United States stands ready to help Zimbabwe achieve meaningful land reform, but we cannot and will not offer support in a climate of violence, lawlessness and intimidation,'' Talbott said at a meeting of the Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.

At least 19 people including three white farmers have died in an illegal land grab by 1970s self-styled liberation war veterans who say they are reclaiming land taken from them under British colonial rule.

``What is happening today in Zimbabwe is tarnishing Southern Africa's well-deserved reputation for building civil society, respecting human rights and establishing the rule of law,'' said Talbott.

Talbott, who was accompanied by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, challenged governments of the regional Southern African Development Community (SADC) to end violence in Zimbabwe and ensure free and fair elections.

``Southern Africa's second largest economy is at risk. So is the peace of the region as a whole, since violence could spill across borders.

``That's why Africa's friends around the world look to SADC to do everything it can to encourage free and fair parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe before August, and to insist on an end to the violence,'' he told the gathering that included ambassadors and senior government officials.

Talbott said land redistribution in Zimbabwe was part of historical inequities that had to be rectified.

``But that's no excuse for the Zimbabwean government to condone -- even instigate -- blatant violations of the rule of law and violence against supporters of opposition parties. Non-racial democracy cannot flourish in an atmosphere of political intolerance,'' he added.

On Sierra Leone, where fighting re-erupted this week and hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers have been taken hostage by rebel troops, Talbott said the crisis underscored the inability of an ill-equipped United Nations to take care of conflict zones.

``The current tragedy in Sierra Leone reminds us that the U.N., all by itself, is inadequate: It's over-burdened, over-extended, under-supported and under-equipped,'' he said. igeria was to host an emergency summit of Sierra Leone's West African neighbors on Tuesday, with ways of bolstering the United Nations force at the top of the agenda.

``Today, as they gather in Abuja, the leaders (of West Africa) face an urgent challenge: to salvage the accords by getting (rebel leader) Foday Sankoh to release the U.N. personnel and disarm his forces,'' Talbott said.

In the Congo, where Rwandan and Ugandan forces clashed last week, Talbott saw little cause for optimism.

``Looking north, the picture is bleaker. Congo remains far from the kind of peaceful neighbor that southern Africa wants and needs,'' he said.