(NEWZIMBABWE) UK made no promise to fund Zimbabwe land reform: report

COMMENT - Interesting parliamentary report on the Lancaster House Agreement/Constitution. What a bunch of cheapskates though. It isn't the Zimbabwean government that should be outraged by this, but the white commercial farmers. They're the ones Britain screwed over when it refuses to pay compensation. I really like the fact that in this information age there is immediate pushback. The Zimbabwe Guardian has an immediate response, and an earlier article from Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, former President of Zambia, titled Understandable Fury.

UK made no promise to fund Zimbabwe land reform: report
by
25/03/2010 00:00:00

BRITAIN made no firm undertaking to fund Zimbabwe’s land reform programme as oft-claimed by Zimbabwe government officials, a new report by MPs from the former colonial power says.

The Africa All Party Parliamentary Group says the December 21, 1979, Lancaster House Agreement was signed “without the Patriotic Front leaders acquiring the powers they wanted to address the chronic land ownership inequality they would inherit”.

The report concludes: “What they (Patriotic Front leaders) had received was assurances from the British and American governments that funds would be committed to assist with land reform ...

“Given this, the Africa All Party Parliamentary Group concludes that no figure was mentioned, much less agreed upon, and that commitments made by either the British or the American government were assurances of support with no price tag attached.”

The report published this week will incense the Zimbabwe government which says Britain and America reneged on promises to fund land reform during the talks that ended an armed insurrection against white colonial rulers, and re-established majority rule in 1980.

In a famous speech delivered in Harlem, United States in 2000, President Robert Mugabe said: “The land we had hoped would come to us easily after the understanding we had reached in 1979 as we negotiated for independence with the British at Lancaster House, and they had agreed to fund the process of land acquisition and resettlement ... still hasn’t come.

“Those who had made the promise then were the government of [Margaret] Thatcher, and here you still had the Democrats under President [Jimmy] Carter. Under the promise that America had also made, they would fund alongside Britain the land reform.”

Mugabe said after Carter was defeated, and President Ronald Reagan took charge, the latter “reneged on the undertaking by President Carter and said ‘no, he was not going to continue the aid programme which the Democrats had started'.”

Mugabe added: “Then in Britain, they also reneged and said that they no longer had any money, and this at the time of Thatcher. But later, we negotiated with the Conservative government a new deal in 1996, but before that new deal saw the light of day, the Conservative party was defeated and in came Blair and his lot.

“Blair said to us very clearly, very blatantly, that they were not in a position to inherit colonial responsibility, what the Conservatives had promised was a matter for the Conservatives, ‘we are a Labour party with its own policies’.

“We tried to reason with them and said, ‘but at international law, surely if you are successor to a legitimate government of Britain you don’t only succeed to assets, you also succeed to liabilities’.”

The British MPs, in their report entitled ‘Land in Zimbabwe: Past Mistakes and Future Prospects’, say they set out to probe a “growing belief among Zimbabweans and others that during the Lancaster House talks that led to Zimbabwe’s independence Britain and the United States made promises concerning land transfer which were later betrayed.”

The MPs add: “These promises, it is claimed, included specific amounts to buy out white Zimbabwean land-owners and set up black Zimbabweans as farmers, thereby righting a colonial wrong.

“British and American versions of events maintain that no promises were made other than to provide substantial funding for agricultural development and land reform. These, they say, were fulfilled until President Mugabe’s government began to pursue what they regarded as unworkable economic policies and allowed land to be seized without compensation. In response, Western donors cut off aid for land reform.”

[They can say what they want, but until 1997, only UKPND 44 million had been made available. The British or Americans were not interested in compensating white farmers for the market value of the land, and they have been trying to put all the blame on the ZANU-PF instead. What they are really afraid of, is that they have to compensate white farmers not only in Zimbabwe, but in Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, and many other African countries. Such is the price of colonialism, that even the world's leading economies cannot pay compensation without going bankrupt. - MrK]

The report says Britain must be a “positive force in the rebuilding of Zimbabwe”, but adds that “if we are to contribute towards a solution, then we must first scrutinise our past and work out what went wrong, where it went wrong and how to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

In an interesting finding, the MPs say Britain and the international community “failed to recognise how vulnerable President Mugabe was to pressure from the war veterans” in the lead up to the 2000 farm invasions by independence war veterans.

“By 1997, pressure in Zimbabwe began to build against President Mugabe. The hitherto benign War Veteran Association first demanded larger pensions and then, in 2000, land,” says the report.

“President Mugabe, unable to extract provisions from Britain or the international community and desperate to remain in power agreed, allowed and even encouraged farm seizures with no compensation.”

Mugabe has accused Britain of sabotaging Zimbabwe’s economy in response to the farm seizures which he defends as a necessary programme to correct immoral land ownership patterns.

As Mugabe, along with Patriotic Front comrade Joshua Nkomo, negotiated the Lancaster House deal in 1979, white Rhodesian settlers made up less than 1% of the population but owned 70% of the land – 6,000 large scale white farmers controlled roughly 40% of the country’s territory while approximately seven million black Zimbabweans were crowded into communal areas.

A major point of frustration with the Lancaster House Agreement for the Zimbabwe leaders was that the constitution could not be altered for 10 years – thereby guaranteeing the property rights of the commercial farmers for a decade after Zimbabwe won its independence.

Land resettlement during that period could only occur through the willing buyer-willing seller scheme, which Britain had pledged to support. Between 1980-1985 the Land Resettlement Programme was moderately successful, but stalled after 1985 when Britain refused to release any more funds. A total of 71,000 families had been resettled.

[And a total of over 320,000 families have been resettled to date - well over a million people. - MrK]