Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba on Monday defended his country’s controversial land-expropriation policy at the start of a five-day visit to Germany.
Following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, Pohamba said that 15 years after shaking off South African rule, land reform to redistribute land from white farmers to black landless people is essential.
The previous willing-buyer, willing-seller policy was proceeding too slowly, the Namibian president said.
The government has issued expropriation orders to 18 white commercial farmers and says the land will be given to almost 250 000 landless people.
Both sides said they aim to enhance mutual relations, according to a statement released in Berlin after Pohamba held talks with President Horst Koehler.
Earlier, Koehler received Pohamba with military ceremony in Berlin. Germany’s links with Namibia go back to the period before World War I when the then South-West Africa was a German colony.
Pohamba was also to meet Development Aid Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul.
Successive German governments have made clear that they will not entertain Namibian demands for compensation for massacres perpetrated by German troops during the 1904/05 uprising by the Herero people in the colony.
In a newspaper interview given ahead of the visit, Wieczorek-Zeul said: ”We have always taken the position that our development work should benefit the entire Namibian population.
”That is also the position of the Namibian government. There are no individual or other claims,” she said.
Herero leaders have in the past demanded compensation for the acts of the German colonial forces.
Wieczorek-Zeul has launched a ”reconciliation initiative” to which Germany will contribute €20-million over 10 years and which will focus on the areas of the population groups affected.
In 1904, imperial German troops put down an uprising in the colony, forcing rebellious Hereros and others into the desert where thousands died.
As development-aid minister for the previous German government, Wieczorek-Zeul apologised last year for the massacres. — Sapa-DPA