GRIFFIN SHEA, Harare | Tuesday
ZIMBABWE’S Supreme Court on Tuesday told President Robert Mugabe’s government to go ahead with plans to hand white-owned farms over to the black majority, in a turnaround that farmers called unprecedented.
The interim ruling reversed an order issued in November, which had found Mugabe’s land reforms unconstitutional and told police to evict occupiers from white farms.
While the nation’s highest court could take months to deliver its full decision, the two-page order clears the legal obstacles that had blocked the government from processing its claims to white-owned farms.
The legal backflip came in a four-to-one decision from a bench dominated by recent Mugabe appointees. Only one senior Supreme Court justice heard the case. The others have taken the bench since March.
The legal advocate for the farmers said the decision was an ”unprecedented” order that went beyond what government lawyers had asked for.
‘I believe we no longer have an independent judiciary.’ – Adrian de Bourbon, legal advocate for farmers ”I believe we no longer have an independent judiciary,” Adrian de Bourbon told reporters after the ruling.
Based on the interim order, de Bourbon said it was ”a fair inference that the court does not recognise that there is a breakdown of law and order” on white-owned farms.
”It not only authorises that the administrative court go ahead, it directs that they proceed,” he said.
Administrative courts must approve the government’s claim to a farm if the owner objects to it seizure.
While the ruling allows the lower courts to proceed, de Bourbon said that on the farms the order means ”quite frankly nothing, because what is happening on the farms has nothing to do with the law.”
Pro-Mugabe militants, led by veterans of the 1970s liberation war, began forcibly occupying white farms in February 2000.
Since then people living in the countryside, both black and white, have suffered widespread intimidation and beatings, even killings and rape.
The violence has gone largely unpunished by police, and the war vets’ campaign has received Mugabe’s open support.
The Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU), which represents most of Zimbabwe’s 4 500 white farmers, had argued before the Supreme Court that since its initial ruling, violence has continued unabated, with beatings, theft, poaching and arson frequent and going unpunished around the country.
The latest ruling came after a month of diplomatic efforts aimed at resolving the political crisis in Zimbabwe, which the government says is rooted in colonial-era inequities that left the tiny white minority owning most of the prime farmland.
Mugabe’s critics say the crisis stems from his efforts to stay in power in the face of the country’s first significant opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The farm violence has had a strong political colouring since the invasions began, with the occupiers closely tied to intimidation of the opposition and other perceived opponents to Mugabe.
Under a Commonwealth-brokered accord reached September 6 in Nigeria, the government agreed to curb the violence in exchange for British financing of the land reforms.
However, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo was ambiguous about that commitment last week during a nationally televised interview.
Talks between the government and white farmers broke down last week, apparently following the government’s stance that it expected the farmers to give it 8,5-million hectares of land on an uncontested basis for resettlement of blacks.
On the eve of the Abuja talks early this month, the government accepted an offer of one million hectares of land from white farmers. – AFP
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