Meeting in Mozambique over land crisis

Malawian President Bakili Muluzi, Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe were expected to meet on Monday for talks on the land crisis plaguing Zimbabwe. “We are more concerned of the acts of violence and the deteriorating economy of Zimbabwe,” an AFP report quoted Muluzi, chairman of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), as saying.

Muluzi was speaking before leaving for Mozambique’s port city of Beira, where the talks were scheduled to take place. “We want to come up with the way forward,” he said. Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform programme has led to violent land occupations by impoverished peasants, pro-government militants and alleged war veterans. The land seizures have also plunged Zimbabwe into its worst economic crisis since independence.

In related developments, Mugabe was quoted as saying in Nigeria’s ‘The Guardian’ newspaper on Sunday that he would not abandon his land reforms because of concern that it was hurting South Africa. In an interview earlier this month but only published on Sunday, according to an AFP report, the embattled leader said: “We are not going to stand by merely because what we do here affects South Africa. We have our own interests, the interests of our people to serve. Potentially a conflict situation exists in South Africa. We didn’t cry when apartheid affected us here in a big way. We said ‘fight justly’.”

During the same interview Mugabe said that by refusing to stop illegal land invasions, he was doing no more than former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who in 1965 had ruled out using troops against a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain by the white minority regime of Ian Smith. However, he expressed confidence that a meeting of foreign ministers from seven Commonwealth countries - including Britain and Zimbabwe - in Nigeria on 6 and 7 September would help find a solution to the international row. “I have confidence in this meeting coming up and after they have met and worked out a programme we expect that there will be follow up action,” he was quoted as saying.

The Zimbabwean government has also rejected reports in the British ‘Sunday Telegraph’ that Mugabe had secret plans to force all white farmers off their farms before next year’s presidential elections.

According to Reuters, the newspaper reported that it had obtained a secret document indicating that the invasions had to be systematic, violent and aimed at terrorising the farmers off their properties. Information Minister Jonathan Moyo was quoted as telling state media on Monday that the report was “stupid, false and malicious”.