ROBERT MUGABE'S latest push for land reform has run smack into
the British government's new guidelines on international aid and
development. Britain will not finance the scheme for
compulsorily buying land from white farmers because, it says,
there is no guarantee that Zimbabwe's poor would be the
benefactors.  Seventeen years after Zimbabwe's independence,
ownership of land remains grossly inequitable. Some 4,500 white
farmers own more than half the country's arable land while 8m
black peasants are crammed into the remaining 40%. Nor is this
the result of ancient history. Much of the land grab by British
colonialists happened after the second world war.  The burning
desire of Zimbabwean peasants to get back their ancestral land
fuelled the guerrilla war in the 1970s. Land was a main issue at
the 1979 constitutional talks. And land is the issue the
president returns to whenever he goes campaigning.  Britain's
Conservative governments maintained that Zimbabwean land reform
would receive British support only if