Farm invasions allegedly ‘orchestrated’

A wave of farm invasions by impoverished ex-combatants of the liberation war have hit white-owned estates across Zimbabwe, in a campaign some analysts claim is being politically orchestrated by a government smarting from its referendum loss last month.

Some 26 farms have been stormed over the past three weeks by war veterans armed with axes, shovels and hoes. According to news reports, the ex-fighters said they were intent on dividing the land among themselves after the government’s draft constitution -which would have allowed for the seizure of white-owned land for redistribution - was defeated in the 12-13 February referendum.

“They (white farmers) should either leave Zimbabwe or give up their land and go to stay in flats in town,” war veterans leader Chenjerai Hunzvi was quoted as saying.

Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri did little to reassure the country’s 4,600 mainly white commercial farmers when he said on Tuesday the police were unable to stop the invasions. “It’s a political issue. What do you expect the police to do ... Talk to the politicians about it,” he said.

According to political scientist Masipule Sithole at the University of Zimbabwe, the farm action is “a ploy by the ruling party to regain lost popularity, but I doubt that it will work.” He told IRIN he believed the campaign was being orchestrated by the government in the light of “the lack of a response from the authorities - they seem to condone it.”

Around half of all Zimbabweans - some six million people - live on 16.4 million hectares of communal lands, 74 percent of which is situated in the poorest agro-ecological zones of the country. According to UNDP’s 1998 Human Development Report on Zimbabwe, large-scale commercial farms occupy 11.2 million hectares of prime land. “The highly inequitable pattern of land ownership is a major source of poverty and inequality,” the report said.

“The land issue is a genuine issue, there’s land hunger. But I don’t think the land invasions are the right way to go about it,” said Sithole, the brother of one of Zimbabwe’s original independence leaders. “All of us sacrificed during the liberation war, some like the peasant families in the countryside a lot more than Hunzvi and the war veterans. If we all went and besieged and occupied land, what would happen? This is a mockery of what we fought for.”

Since independence in 1980, fewer than 100,000 rural families have been resettled. The government, constitutionally barred for the first 10 years of rule from expropriating land, has said it does not have the money to buy farms at market prices for redistribution. A donors conference in 1998 offered financial support for land reform if it was conducted transparently and met poverty-alleviation criteria. Funds have been slow to arrive over donor concerns that the government will not meet those benchmarks.

“I think the donors are correct,” Sithole said. “The government should account for land currently owned by the leadership. How have they (the owners) improved the lives of their farm workers?”