Land crisis deepens

Zimbabwe’s land crisis deepened on Monday when war veterans and landless peasants ignored a government order to vacate white-owned farms they had illegally occupied in protest over a lack of progress on redistribution, news reports said.

More than 200 farms have been taken over in a campaign that government critics allege has been orchestrated by the ruling party to punish white farmers who campaigned for the rejection of a draft constitution which would have allowed the government to expropriate their estates. Last week, Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa gave the squatters a deadline of Monday to vacate the farms, which police have reportedly not enforced. News reports quoted veterans as saying they would resist any attempt to evict them.

President Robert Mugabe has appeared to back the land protest, sowing further confusion. The government has also gazetted a constitutional amendment identical to the clause that was rejected in a February referendum which would allow the state to seize farms and only pay for improvements rather than the land itself.

“In a country like ours where the whole problem of land has been unresolved over the last 20 years, people have a right to demonstrate their displeasure. To simply suggest that the demonstrations smack of anarchy misses the point. There is a fundamental issue (of land reform),” the former spokesman of the government’s constitutional commission, Jonathan Moyo, told IRIN on Monday.

“The pressures that have built-up for land reform have reached a boiling point,” a political analyst explained. “The veterans are saying no one is listening to us, so we are going to do this to call attention to our plight ... They have a very historical view of injustice and they see the answer as white farmers giving up their land.”

According to the analyst, to a large extent the campaign has been spontaneous and threatens to escalate. “I don’t know how to link the government to it in a direct way. But the real lack of response when it started happening points to some kind of support or collusion.”

For Zimbabwe, struggling to attract foreign investment into an economy already under extreme pressure, the land crisis is going to have “a very negative effect” internationally. The Zimbabwe government has tried to portray the land issue as the fault of Britain, the former colonial power, for refusing to fund a resettlement programme. But, for the donors, the problem has been the lack of transparency in the government’s redistribution plans, the analyst told IRIN.

The analyst added the government’s focus on seizing farms is simplistic and overlooks the need to have the resources to plough into redistributed land under a comprehensive rural development programme.

“No one quarrels with that,” Moyo said. “But this is a political issue - it’s the concrete result of the ‘No’ vote (in the referendum) and displeasure over the way the vote took place.”