The farmer, Crawford von Abo – who is a citizen of South Africa, but owned several farms in Zimbabwe – wants the Pretoria High Court to declare that he is entitled to diplomatic protection and that President Thabo Mbeki’s government must protect his rights from violation by the Harare authorities.Von Abo argues that he was left broke during Zimbabwe’s chaotic land reform when his 14 farms were invaded and looted. When he refused to vacate his last farm he was arrested by police.
The farmer’s lawyer told the court on May 6 that the South African government had been tardy in its attempts to protect Von Abo’s properties from seizure.”Von Abo had been there for 50 years. He had built up a large enterprise and was entitled to be dealt with as an individual . . . the respondents (South African government) simply passed the buck and failed to deal with the matter. They talked a lot, but each time they passed the buck to another department,” the lawyer said.Mugabe’s government has over the past eight years seized white-owned farms for re-distribution to landless blacks in a programme it said was meant to correct a colonial and unjust land tenure system that reserved the best arable land for whites while blacks were crowded on poor soils.
In the court application before judge Bill Prinsloo, Von Abo argued that unlike in his case, German and French farmers had their Zimbabwean properties returned to them after their governments successfully intervened on their behalf.The South African farmer is also asking the court to order Mbeki’s government to do everything possible to remedy the violation of his rights, including seeking affiliation to the International Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) so that he could use international arbitration to lodge claims against Zimbabwe.
Since 2000 Zimbabwe’s government has seized most of the farms owned by the country’s about 4 000 white commercial farmers with many of the former white-owned farms ending up in the hands of Mugabe’s top officials instead of the landless black villagers that Harare says are the intended beneficiaries of land redistribution.A SADC Tribunal is due to make a ruling this month on whether Zimbabwe’s land re-distribution programme violates Article 6 of the regional treaty that bars member states from discriminating against any person on the grounds of gender, religion, race, ethnic origin and culture.
A ruling declaring land reform illegal would have far reaching consequences for Mugabe’s government, opening the floodgates for thousands of claims of damages by dispossessed white farmers.Such a ruling could also set Harare on a collision course with its SADC member governments, particularly if it – as it has always done with court rulings against its land reforms – refuses to abide by an unfavourable Tribunal judgment.Farm seizures are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into severe food shortages after the government displaced established white commercial farmers and replaced them with either incompetent or inadequately funded black farmers. – ZimOnline
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