GRIFFIN SHEA and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Monday
AS the deadline for President Robert Mugabe’s government to obey Supreme Court orders to return the rule of law to the country’s commercial farming areas, a new surge of illegal “resettlement” operations has overrun scores of white-owned farms.
Zimbabwe’s government says the ruling declaring its land reform scheme unconstitutional will not stop its controversial plans to resettle black peasant farmers on white-owned farms.
“The order does not stop the fast-track program because land reform is unstoppable,” Information Minister Jonathan Moyo told the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper.
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the government’s “fast track” scheme, under which land was to be taken from white farmers and resettled with landless blacks before the beginning of the rainy season this month, was unconstitutional.
The illegal resettlements at the weekend do not technically contravene the Supreme Court orders because court officials have not yet served the court papers on the government officers listed in the orders.
The court also ordered police to evict squatters led by self-styled veterans of the 1970s war for independence, who with the government’s open support have forcibly occupied 1600 white-owned farms since February.
In the fertile Mazowe valley about 50 km north of Harare, a government official led a group of about 100 people on to farms and declared the properties “resettled.”
However, witnesses said, after each illegal “hand over ceremony,” everyone brought on to the farm boarded the government vehicles again and went on to the next farm.
“It’s the same old rent-a-crowd every time,” said a farmer. “The same people are being resettled several times over.”
The case was brought to the Supreme Court by the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which represents 4 500 mostly white farmers, in a bid to end the politically charged and often violent squatter movement.
The government has so far ignored two earlier High Court rulings, which had also ordered evictions of the squatters.
Under the “fast track” scheme, the government has listed more than 2300 farms covering five million ha for resettlement in a bid to redress colonial-era inequalities in land ownership.