Land invasions a crime against humanity: CFU

The unity government of President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Premier Arthur Mutambara has watched helplessly as members of the security forces and hardliner activists of Mugabes Zanu (PF) party intensified in recent weeks a drive to seize all land still in white hands.

We reiterate (that) what commercial farmers and their workers are being subjected to constitutes crimes against humanity, CFU president Deon Theron said in a statement that called on the coalition government to act to end lawlessness on farms in keeping with the 2008 power-sharing agreement that gave birth to the administration.

It is time for the GNU (government of national unity) to take a principled stand in this regard, said Theron. Under the power-sharing agreement, Zimabbwes three main political leaders promised to restore the rule of law in the farming sector, including carrying out a land audit to weed out multiple farm owners all of them senior ZANU PF officials who have hoarded most of the best farms seized from whites.

The coalition government is yet to act to fullfil the promise to restore law and order in the key agricultural sector, while more farms — including some owned by foreigners and protected under bilateral investment protection agreements between Zimbabwe and other nations — have been seized over the past few months.

And to make matters worse, according to the CFU, some police and judicial officers who are supposed to enforce the rule of law were also among the beneficiaries of the free-for-all land grab. The mainly white CFU said that it has recorded a steady escalation of state-sponsored violence and unlawful disturbances on commercial farms over the past few months that has prevented the majority of its members from planting crops for the 2009/10 season.

In a separate statement an organisation representing workers in the agricultural sector, the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) also called for an end to the chaos on the farms that it says continues to destroy the livelihoods of farm workers.

The General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) urgently calls for a stop to the continued farm disturbances, which have resulted in a serious farm labour crisis that is threatening to completely destroy the agriculture sector, said the union. GAPWUZ neither condones nor encourages the current attempts to deliberately take over farms by way of murdering, attacking and intimidating workers and their employers, it added.

Fresh farm disturbances in Zimbabwe have reportedly rendered over 4 000 farm workers homeless since the formation last February of the unity government. The decade-long farm invasions, which Mugabe says were necessary to ensure blacks also had access to arable land that they were denied by previous white-led governments, have been blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages.

Once a net food exporter Zimbabwe has avoided mass starvation over the past decade only because international relief agencies were quick to chip in with food handouts. Mugabe has vowed to continue the land acquisition, despite a November 2008 ruling by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal outlawing farm seizures because they were discriminatory, racist and illegal under the SADC Treaty.