Removed white Zimbabwean farmers take their case to African regional bodies

Justice for Agriculture (JAG), a Zimbabwean organisation advocating the plight of about 4,300 white commercial farmers dispossessed of their land by the government's fast-track land reform programme, says it will take its case to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal.

JAG's decision to resort to the tribunal was spurred by a Supreme Court ruling week that the government could acquire all farming equipment and machinery belonging to dispossessed white farmers.

The SADC Tribunal ... has a mandate to ensure that member countries adhere to the rule of law.

John Worswick, chief executive officer of JAG, said they would also take their case to the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR), a statutory body of the African Union based in Gambia. It monitors the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights to ensure that "freedom, equality, justice and dignity are essential objectives for the achievement of the legitimate aspirations of the African peoples."

Several Supreme Court justices are among the beneficiaries of Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform programme, which sought to redistribute white commercial farmland to blacks. Critics of the policy say it has instead seen land handed out to government officials, politicians and high-ranking members of the ruling ZANU-PF party, and army and police officers.

President Robert Mugabe launched the government's fast-track land reform programme in 2000, but many white farmers warehoused their farming equipment and machinery before or after their land had been redistributed.

According to international donor agencies, more than a third of the population, or 4.1 million people, require emergency food aid, which analysts say was a result of the chaotic land reform programme and drought. The government blames the food shortages on sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union as well as the weather.

In a bid to regain Zimbabwe's previous position as a next exporter of food, the government has embarked on a programme to mechanise agriculture, and has created a new ministry to oversee the process.

However, the inflation rate of nearly 8,000 percent - the highest in the world - has also led to acute shortages of foreign exchange to buy spare parts, chemical inputs, fuel and electricity. The recent poor winter wheat harvest was blamed on shortages of fuel and electricity, which made electrical and fuel-driven irrigation equipment inoperable.

The court ruling has triggered a wave of farm machinery seizures from the few remaining white commercial farmers, said to be about 400, and farmers said there had been reports of new evictions of white commercial farmers since the ruling.

Worswick claimed, "Since 2000, all judgements relating to land have been political judgements, and not based on justice and fairness. We are in the process of exhausting all legal avenues...The fact that the Supreme Court made its ruling does not mean that we should give up. We are prepared to go all the way to international courts in ... The Hague."

Of the about 4,300 white farmers evicted from their farms, only 300 had been compensated, according to Worswick. "The few that accepted the ridiculously low compensation were the elderly farmers who had become destitute because they could not farm. A majority of them wanted to buy medication," he said.

The farmers maintain that in terms of the value of land and infrastructure, such as dams, houses and barns, they are owed a total of US$30 billion, but the government argues that the farmers should only be paid compensation for improvements on the land, as it was stolen from the indigenous people by settlers during the country's colonisation in the 1890s.

IRIN