Commercial farm beneficiaries named

The government has begun publishing the names of about 100,000 Zimbabweans who will receive "large pieces of property" for commercial farming under its controversial land redistribution programme.

Presidential spokesman George Charamba told IRIN on Monday that the names would be published in the state media throughout the week. He said people had been invited to apply for commercial farming land to the government last year.

"We got a response of close to 100,000 applicants and we have been processing these applications. What you got today is a list of those Zimbabweans who applied under the A2 scheme (for resettlement on farming land) and will receive large pieces of property," he said.

Dismissing allegations that the beneficiaries' names were released in time to boost President Robert Mugabe's chances of re-election in presidential polls next March, Charamba said more than 135,000 families had been resettled since June last year until now, under the government's smallholder A1 scheme designed to provide peasant farmers with between four and 40 hectares of land each.

However, he added: "No one is going to make apologies about the political significance of land distribution. That is the contract ZANU-PF [the ruling party] made to people. It said it would deliver land and that is what it is going to do."

Charamba also dismissed allegations that ZANU-PF supporters and senior members were on the beneficiaries' list. He said a large number of diverse people had benefited from the redistribution programme since the 1980s and claimed there were "quite a number of white people who have actually been allocated land" through the distribution programme.

Mugabe faces his stiffest political challenge since independence in 1980 as campaigning heats up for the March poll, with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) reportedly strengthening its hold in urban and some rural areas in recent months.

According to a BBC news report on Monday, about 1,700 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe have been occupied - many violently - while about 8.5 million hectares of land (about 95 percent of all white-owned land) has been earmarked for redistribution to landless Zimbabweans.

The farm seizures were declared illegal by the country's High Court, the report said, but the ruling was reversed after the government appointed four new judges. It added that the first farmer to sue individual government ministers over land reform had this month won a minor victory in his battle to get his farm back.

Guy Watson, who was quoted as saying that he believed his seized farm was to be handed to a senior official close to the government, won the right to have all the property from his farm returned to him. He said he would continue his case against the government from South Africa, where he has since moved.