Harare | Saturday
ZIMBABWE will only move occupiers off farms not already earmarked for resettlement, meaning fewer than five percent of farms could be affected by a deal reached at Commonwealth talks, Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge said on Friday.
“We will be dealing with land which has not been designated and which the government has no plans to acquire,” Mudenge told reporters upon returning from the Commonwealth talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
“The majority of the occupiers are occupying land that has been designated,” he said.
Zimbabwe’s government has designated more than 95% of white-owned farms for resettlement, covering 9,5-million hectares, an area larger than Portugal.
Earlier in Abuja, Mudenge told reporters that “a process will begin where, in an energised way, those on land which we have no intention of acquiring will be removed.”
At the meeting in Abuja on Thursday, Zimbabwe agreed to end illegal occupations of farmland and in return, the former colonial power Britain agreed to make a “significant financial contribution” to funding a land reform programme.
Mudenge said in Harare that with money from the international community to buy land for resettlement the violence ravaging Zimbabwe’s countryside would end on its own.
“Without frustration (over land reforms), we expect that people will be acting in their usual way. As we know, the people of Zimbabwe are by culture and civilisation a peaceful people,” he said.
In Abuja, Mudenge denied that the Zimbabwean government had a policy of tolerating or encouraging violence — although President Robert Mugabe has publicly supported the land occupiers.
“The government of Zimbabwe has no policy of intimidation, it has no policy of violence, and it will continue to show, within the means available to it, that there is no violence, that there is no intimidation,” he said.
Officials at the conference have hailed the Abuja deal as “a total breakthrough” after more than 18 months of upheaval and unrest.
However, many in Zimbabwe doubt whether the government is really committed to moving the war veterans and landless farmers off the white-owned farmlands.
Zimbabwe’s war veteran leader Joseph Chinotimba, who has led violent invasions of white-owned farms, said on Friday his supporters will not move off the land yet despite a Commonwealth deal.
Asked whether he would start moving his followers off white-owned farms in the wake of Thursday’s agreement, Chinotimba said: “No. White farmers, they are the ones causing all the trouble. Our people have been allocating land legally.”
“I don’t know about any deal in Abuja. I don’t get my news from the radio. I am waiting for my foreign minister to come back and tell me,” Chinotimba added. – AFP
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