(HERALD) ‘Tribunal seeks to reverse land reform’

‘Tribunal seeks to reverse land reform’
Herald Reporter

THE recent judgment by the Sadc Tribunal granting interim relief to white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe from having their farms compulsorily acquired by the State "seeks to negate the country’s history", sources close to the Presidency have said. While Government spokespersons could not be drawn into discussing the issue, sources said that in a Monday meeting of the State Presidium, it was agreed that the judgment ignored the historical realities surrounding the land question in the country and treated it as a run-of-the-mill property dispute.

"The Presidium said that the judgment was ahistorical in that it ignores the country’s history. The Sadc Tribunal handled the application by the farmers in the same way that a court would handle an ordinary property dispute between two people over a residential stand.

"But that clearly is not the case. The Presidium said land was a property that was alienated from a large section of the population on the basis of race for some 100 years in circumstances of colonial occupation. They said while people could fault the procedure of acquisition, they could not fault the fact of acquisition itself.

"Land acquisition is tied to the process of decolonisation and this is a fact that even the British accepted at Lancaster. The parties may have disagreed on the modalities of acquisition and as you know the UK wanted a willing-buyer willing-seller system, but no one ever disagreed on the inescapable reality that this Government would acquire land.

"This is something that the tribunal seems to be trying to do," the sources said.

They added that the Presidium had also agreed that there was no way that anyone could not try and stop the decolonisation process "through legal means outside Zimbabwe when the right to land was won through a liberation war in Zimbabwe by Zimbabweans".

"It was said that it made no sense for a blood-won right to be taken away through legal fiat based on ordinary property relations," they said.

According to the sources, the Presidium also questioned the standing of the tribunal on the basis of its staffing.

"The Sadc Tribunal is staffed by High Court judges from the region. In effect, what this means is that lower court officials have been given the power to override even their own Supreme Courts and Chief Justices in their respective national jurisdictions.

"This upsets the hierarchy of the legal systems in the individual Sadc constituent members and that is one of the reasons why Zimbabwe has not ratified the relevant protocols that created the Sadc Tribunal."

The Attorney-General’s Office in Harare is expected to fully challenge the March 28 judgment by the regional court when the main proceedings resume in Windhoek, Namibia, in May.