Proposed changes to Zimbabwe’s Constitution that seek to make it easier for the government to seize farmland from whites could be aimed at ethnic cleansing, the country’s top white farmer said on Tuesday.
Zimbabwe’s Parliament is this year expected to debate constitutional amendments that will make it impossible for white farmers to seek legal recourse once the government has earmarked their land for expropriation.
”As virtually every white farmer has been listed for acquisition in some way or other, this surely provides direct evidence that a process of ethnic cleansing is taking place,” Doug Taylor-Freeme, president of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), said.
The government last month published the proposed constitutional reforms that will allow the state immediately to assume ownership of farmland once a property has been officially listed for expropriation.
Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa has said the proposed amendment would remove the delays caused by legal battles launched by farmers objecting ”not that they want the land back, but just to frustrate the programme”.
Taylor-Freeme told his union’s annual congress in the capital that farmers were not interested in politics, but added that the planned law ”is an admission that the existing Land Act is not workable and that the government has failed to acquire land in an orderly, legal and amicable way”.
Zimbabwe’s land reforms, which began, often violently, in 2000 after the rejection in a referendum of a government-sponsored draft Constitution, have seen about 4 000 white farmers evicted from their properties.
The land has been redistributed to landless blacks in a move that the government has said is designed to correct imbalances created by colonial rule, when the majority of prime farmland was owned by about 4 500 whites.
But critics have blamed the reforms in part for a fall in agricultural production.
Taylor-Freeme said the ”draconian law … is going to further enhance the collapse of the agricultural industry”.
Central bank deputy governor, Nick Ncube, said at the congress that the agricultural sector had suffered a cumulative decline of 19,4% between 2001 and 2003.
Taylor-Freeme said the new law was ”likely to increase the conflict of ownership of the business on the land and reduce any meaningful investment to agriculture”.
A retired High Court judge, George Smith, told the meeting that the planned changes along with a host of other land laws introduced over the past five years ”show that there is no clear plan or policy” around the land issue.
Mutasa this week ruled out any plans to lure back white commercial farmers who lost their land during the country’s land reforms.
Many farmers have emigrated to Mozambique, Nigeria or Zambia while others have gone as far afield as Australia. Fewer than 500 remain farming in Zimbabwe out of the 4 500 operating before the reform. – Sapa-AFP