/ 11 October 2007

Will Zim’s last white farmers stand trial?

A court was to rule on Thursday whether 11 of Zimbabwe's last remaining white farmers should stand trial after they stayed on their properties in defiance of a government eviction order. A magistrate in the farming town of Chegutu will also to decide whether the 11 can appeal against their impending eviction.

A court was to rule on Thursday whether 11 of Zimbabwe’s last remaining white farmers should stand trial after they stayed on their properties in defiance of a government eviction order.

In a test case that will likely determine the fate of all the other white farmers, a magistrate in the farming town of Chegutu was also to decide whether the 11 can appeal against their impending eviction in the Supreme Court.

”The magistrate is expected to make a ruling later this morning whether they should be allowed to make their constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court or they go on trial,” said their lawyer David Drury.

Drury said the farmers from the north-western Mashonaland West Province were summoned to a magistrate’s court in Chegutu, 100km north-west of Harare, to answer charges of breaching the Gazette Land Consequential Provisions Act after their land was earmarked for expropriation.

Among them was wildlife farm owner Ben Freeth who complained that the uncertainty caused by the court was frustrating business at his farm.

Under the law, a farmer is given an ultimatum to wrap up his business and vacate his property if it is designated for the resettlement of black farmers and faces a two-year jail term if found guilty of breaching the law.

Lawyers have protested that there is no case warranting putting the farmers on trial and applied for the case to be heard in the Supreme Court.

Freeth said the farmers last week appealed to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) tribunal to stop the planned evictions.

Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, is facing a critical shortage of wheat which has forced most bakers to close temporarily or scale down their production.

The staple cornmeal is also scarce and at least 4,1-million people, nearly a third of the population, will require food aid during the lean spell extending to the country’s next harvest, according to the United Nations’s World Food Programme.

Harare blames the shortfall on drought, but critics put much of the blame on its agricultural policy begun eight years ago.

Often violent land reforms saw the seizures of at least 4 000 properties formerly run by white farmers for redistribution to landless black Zimbabweans, the majority of whom lacked the skills and means to farm.

Some of the beneficiaries of the land reforms have been accused of holding on to fallow land for prestige or turning the farms into party venues.

Less than 400 white farmers are still believed to be operating in Zimbabwe as a result of the land reform programme.

President Robert Mugabe has been unapologetic about the expropriations, saying criticism was inspired by Western anger that the rulers of the former British colony had ”dared to take our destiny into our own hands”. ‒ Sapa-AFP