Maravi

(TALKZIMBABWE) Govt rejects tribunal ruling on white farmers

COMMENT - Those white farmers have a lot of 'cheek'. They protest farm repossessions on the basis of 'racial discrimination', when they only received those farms and were supported in that by the government of the day because they were white. And this tribunal sat in Namibia, the place of Germany's first holocaust, and itself suffering from apartheid style land theft.

Govt rejects tribunal ruling on white farmers
TZG/Herald
Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:14:00 +0000

THE Government of Zimbabwe has rejected Sadc Tribunal’s ruling that 78 white former commercial farmers whose properties were compulsorily acquired by Government for resettlement could keep their farms and said that the land reform programme will not be reversed.

The Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, Didymus Mutasa, said the Zimbabwean Government would disregard the judgment made last week.

"They (the tribunal) are day-dreaming because we are not going to reverse the land reform exercise," he said and added that the Government would continue with planned acquisitions in line with policies set up eight years ago.

Mutasa emphasized that the remaining white-owned farms would be acquired by Government for the benefit of those black farmers who were marginalized by the white settler regime for decades.

The minister said the acquisition was meant to correct decades of land injustice in Zimbabwe.

"There is nothing special about the 75 farmers and we will take more farms. It’s not discrimination against farmers, but correcting land imbalances," he said.

Last December the Sadc's Namibian-based tribunal prevented Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's government from evicting Chegutu farmer Michael Campbell, his 65 employees and their families from his Mount Carmell farm ─ one of the country's main exporters of mangoes and citrus fruits. The number of farmers in the case rose to 78.

The Sadc ruling was made in accordance with the declaration and treaty that Harare signed in August 1992 on regional trade agreements.

The farmers said Harare in breach of its obligations under the treaty, after it signed into law Amendment 17 more than two years ago and that it discriminated on racial grounds.

The amendment allows the seizure of white-owned farms, for distribution to landless blacks, without compensation. It also bars courts from hearing appeals from the dispossessed white farmers.

Lawyers’ papers argued that “a failure by member states to uphold the principles of human rights, democracy and the rule of law” would cut across the range of commitments Sadc states had entered into under the constitutive act of the African Union and African charter on human and people's rights.

On Friday, the Sadc Tribunal ruled that 78 white farmers could keep their farms because the land reform programme discriminated against them.

President of the tribunal Judge Luis Mondlane said the Zimbabwean Government had violated the treaty governing the 15-nation regional bloc by compulsorily acquiring white-owned farms for resettlement.

"The 78 applicants have a clear legal title (for their farms) and were denied access to the judiciary locally," he said.

Judge Mondlane ordered the Government "to take all measures to protect the possessions and ownership" of the 75 farmers still on their farms.

Mutasa dismissed the call to protect the farmers, saying Government would treat white farmers equally as everyone else.

The verdict was the first major ruling by the Sadc Tribunal since it first convened in April last year.

A lawyer representing resettled farmers, Advocate Farai Mutamangira, described the ruling by the regional court as shocking because it ignored the history of the land issue in Zimbabwe.

He said the tribunal had consistently demonstrated lack of understanding of land reform in Zimbabwe and its meaning to Zimbabweans.

"The tribunal deliberately chose to ignore history and proceeded to decide the matter outside of its historical context. The tribunal got the whole matter wrong at both the municipal and international law. There were so many avenues of escape for the tribunal.

"There are more than 100 reasons and grounds upon which the tribunal could have made findings in favour of the beneficiaries of the land reform, but deliberately chose not to do so," he said.

Adv Mutamangira questioned the logic for and reasons as well as the jurisprudence that the tribunal is developing for the region.

He added that the tribunal decision was completely at variance with the whole essence of liberation and self-determination.

"In short, the tribunal has behaved like a colonial court of the 1950s and 60s by entrenching and protecting colonial minority interests," he said.

Government, Adv Mutamangira said, would not abandon its policy on land on the basis of the shocking ruling by the tribunal.

The SADC tribunal was created as part of a peer review mechanism within the organisation. It aims to ensure the objectives of Sadc’s founding treaty, including human rights and property rights, are upheld.

TZG/Herald

Labels: DIDYMUS MUTASA, LAND REFORM, SADC

posted by MrK @ 6:02 AM