SA court ruling: a blow to Mugabe land reforms

Zimbabwes High Court in a ruling last month refused to enforce the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal judgment, while Mugabe has said the regional courts order to stop farm seizures and compensate white land owners for lost property was nonsensical and of no consequence.

But last Thursdays ruling means farmers can attach Zimbabwean government-owned property in South Africa such as Air Zimbabwe jets as compensation for lost farms, said the AfriForum group that filed the Pretoria application on behalf of farmers, Louis Fick, Michael Campbell and Richard Etheredge, who lost land in Zimbabwe.

We succeeded in getting an order that the SADC ruling be recognised in South Africa. This means that the ruling has been registered, is now recognised and can be enforced here as it has become part of South African law, said AfriForum official Willie Spies.

Our next move then is to start findings of ways of attaching the property. We will use South African civil procedures to sell those assets and provide restitution to the farmers, he added.

The Tribunal in November 2008 declared Mugabes land reform programme discriminatory, racist and illegal under the SADC Treaty.

The regional court directed the Zimbabwe government not to seize land from the 79 farmers who had appealed to the Namibia-based court and said Harare must compensate those it had already evicted from their farms.

Mugabe ignored the Tribunal ruling while his supporters have stepped up a campaign to drive Zimbabwes few remaining white farmers off the land.

And Harare High Court Judge Bharat Patel last month ruled that Zimbabwe was bound by rulings of the regional court but said the order on farm seizures could not be implemented because it was against public policy.

Blocking the Tribunal order, Patel said its enforcement would effectively undo Mugabes land reforms of the past decade, with all white farmers who lost land expected to use the judgment to claim their properties back.

The Harare judge said this would require the government to evict tens of thousands of black families resettled on farms seized from whites in order to return the land to lawful owners, a move he described as a political enormity with potential to cause upheaval in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe, who says his land reforms were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, has previously vowed that land seizures are irreversible.

Critics blame the chaotic and often violent reforms for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after Mugabe failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.