Hundreds of black peasant farmers in Zimbabwe were this week forcibly evicted from two formerly white-owned farms that they occupied during the 2000 land invasions, witnesses, civic groups and police said on Friday.
A witness said he saw scores of huts on fire after riot police had ordered all farmers without official permits to settle on the properties to vacate.
Police confirmed they were involved in the exercise to remove the farmers ”who had imposed themselves” on the farms situated about 50km north of the capital, Harare.
”Yes, we moved in to remove them … [and] some of the houses were burnt in the process,” police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena said in an interview.
He said the farms are for ranching and not suitable for crop growing, yet all of the farmers who had settled on them had planted maize and other food crops.
”Hundreds of new farmers and their families are stranded at Little England and Inkomo farms … after police torched and destroyed their huts following a government order to evict them,” said a coalition of human and civic-rights organisations, Crisis in Zimbabwe.
Police said a series of meetings had earlier been held between government officials and the settlers on the plan to evict them.
A witness said the farms are to be re-allocated to large-scale commercial black farmers, while the evictees have not been given alternative accommodation.
The government embarked in 2000 on land reforms that saw veterans of the liberation war along with pro-government supporters invading white-owned farms.
The farms were parcelled into smaller pieces of land and allocated to landless blacks, some of whom had left their crowded communal rural homes to move to the new settlements.
Under the land-reform programme launched in 2000, nearly 4 000 of the country’s 4 500 white farmers, who owned 70% of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land, lost their property.
The controversial land reform plan is cited as one of the reasons for the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, once Southern Africa’s bread basket. — Sapa-AFP