BRONWEN ROBERTS, Cape Town | Wednesday
SOUTH African farmers have made an impassioned plea to the international community to rescue them from rural attacks, saying the violence was an “orchestrated bid” to force farmers off their land, as the government announced a land restitution programme was picking up speed.
“It’s about forcing them to either share or to leave their land. That is why farmers are being murdered,” said Werner Weber, leader of a project to stop farrm attacks. “We are being killed like doves.”
According to the commercial farmers’ union AgriSA, more than 800 people have died in attacks on farms since 1991. Between January and August this year, 88 farmers were killed in about 586 attacks. Another 288 people were injured.
A report commissioned by then president Nelson Mandela in 1998 found that the attacks were mostly purely criminal, not designed to drive farmers off their land.
Some 80% of farmland in South Africa is still owned by whites, although they make up only 13% of the population, but the government is buying up farmland at agreed prices for distribution.
President Thabo Mbeki has stressed that he will not tolerate illegal land occupations, like those in Zimbabwe where landless blacks moved onto 1500 white-owned farms in the first part of this year.
Land Claims Commissioner Wallace Mgoqi told a parliamentary committee in Cape Town that more than 6530 claims had been settled out of 63455 lodged by the cut-off date of the end of 1998.
The claims settled involved about 268 000 ha of land, worth about R136m, handed to almost 13000 households, according to a report handed by Mgoqi to the committee.
Mgoqi admitted that the land restitution process started after the apartheid government was voted out of power in 1994 had initially been “painfully slow.”
“The process has picked up speed and the momentum is picking up all the time,” he added.
The commission was also considering expropriating – at a set price – land from white farmers unwilling to accept the government’s offer for their land, he said. – AFP