OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday
ZIMBABWE’S Supreme Court this week again tried to end a violent squatter campaign on white-owned farms, and gave President Robert Mugabe’s government six months to craft an acceptable land reform program.
The nation’s highest court told police for the third time in two months that they had to evict squatters from the 1 600 or so white-owned farms they have forcibly occupied since February.
“Wicked things have been done and continue to be done. They must be stopped … The activities of the past nine months must be condemned,” the court said on Thursday.
The court said that if Mugabe’s government could not craft a workable and legal land reform scheme by July 1, 2001, it would bar the government from moving to take any more land.
But the government’s unwillingness to implement earlier court orders telling police to shift the squatters means this latest ruling is unlikely to make much difference.
The rulings have mostly served to add the judiciary to Mugabe’s growing list of targets for attack, with the president openly saying he does not feel bound by court decisions on land reform.
He and his ministers regularly lump the judiciary together with his nation’s white minority, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Britain and international donors as colluding against his 20-year regime.
“They will not be allowed to go against our quest for full sovereignty, our quest to fulfil the wishes of the vast majority of our people, in favour of a mere 4 000 white racist commercial farmers,” Mugabe said of the courts, ahead of his party’s congress last week.
Under Mugabe’s scheme, the government has earmarked about 2 500 mostly white-owned farms that it plans to seize and resettle with poor black farmers in a bid to redress colonial-era inequalities.
The president has openly supported the squatter movement, led by self-styled veterans of the 1970s liberation war and linked to widespread political violence that has left at least 36 dead and thousands beaten.
Thursday’s 30-page ruling detailed the court’s legal reasoning for the order, first handed down on November 10.
The Supreme Court noted that land reform could be done in accordance with the constitution, but said that the government’s latest scheme failed to do so.
The court said the listing of farms was legal, but said the scheme for seizing and resettling the farms was not.
“It is overwhelmingly obvious that the farm invasions are, have been, and continue to be, unlawful,” it said. -AFP