Harare | Wednesday
WITH no end in sight to violence on Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms, lawyers for farm workers are increasingly worried over the fate of tens of thousands of workers and their families, who have effectively disappeared.
Pro-government militants, who have occupied farms for 20 months now, have blocked off huge swaths of the countryside, making it difficult for workers’ advocates and aid agencies to count how many people have been displaced by the violence.
The only common factor among the estimates is that tens of thousands of people have been forced from their homes and jobs on the farms, and no one knows where they have gone.
In the farming community of Hwedza, 100 kilometers southeast of Harare, schools, homes and shops catering for farm workers were deserted.
Some homes have been burned, and farmers said the workers became so afraid of the pro-government militants that they decided to pack up and take their chances in the bush.
The Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) estimated in a survey of the farms last month that about 75 000 people, including workers and their families, have been forced off the farms where they were previously housed and employed.
But workers’ advocates put the number far higher. The Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe, which promotes workers’ rights, estimates the number of displaced at 300 000, based on the government’s own data on resettlement.
The General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), the labour union for farm workers, says the number is more like 800 000, including workers who lost their jobs on farms that closed because of the violence.
”Exactly to say how they are surviving, given that these people are not given termination benefits as such, it’s a mystery. They are surviving on the generosity of the villagers,” GAPWUZ president Clement Sungayi said.
”Most of them are just going into the rural areas, or into squatter camps” in the bush, he said.
Sungayi said he and other GAPWUZ officials have struggled to track down the displaced workers’ whereabouts, but have been blocked from searching the areas near occupied farms by ruling party militants.
”It looks like the war vets (liberation war veterans) have the upper hand when some of these issues come up,” he said, referring to the militants who have helped to organise the farm occupations. So far, he said, the government has turned a blind eye to the workers’ plight, in part because of the perception that workers and their union back the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). But Sungayi said workers come from all political persuasions.
The only time government officials have agreed to meet with representatives of farm workers was at the regional summit here in September, when leaders from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) forced the government to meet with a broad cross-section of Zimbabwean society.
Sungayi and other advocates said the need to find the workers and determine their needs was quickly becoming desperate, as Zimbabwe faces a massive shortage of food grains before the next harvest.
”The situation is critical, in that they are not getting food.
And if they are not getting wages, they are not going to buy food,” said Godfrey Magaramombe, director of the Farm Community Trust.
Farmers have set up several initiatives to provide some care for workers affected by the government’s land reforms, but CFU officials said those efforts only work if they know where the workers are.
”Once they’ve left the farms, a significant number of them we don’t know what has happened to,” CFU director David Hasluck said. – Sapa-AFP