WATCH – Forcibly evicted white farmers return as tenants in Zimbabwe
Former white farmers that were forcibly removed twenty years ago during Robert Mugabe’s chaotic land reform are returning to the land as tenants of black farm owners.
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Former white farmers that were forcibly removed twenty years ago during Robert Mugabe’s chaotic land reform are returning to the land as tenants of black farm owners.
Zimbabwe has signed a $3.5 billion deal to compensate white commercial farmers who were evicted from their land 20 years ago. 4,500 white farmers had land expropriated without compensation to settle 300 000 black families.
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Former white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe who had their land expropriated under the fast track land reform programme in the early 2000s have accepted government’s offer of an interim payment.
To tell us a little more on this story is Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to South Africa, David Hamadziripi.
The Zimbabwean government says that it is now planning to give compensation to white farmers who were forced off the land they occupied by the government of then Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. His land reform programme saw four and a half thousand white farmers removed from the land they farmed. Mugabe’s critics say that that programme led to the economic crisis in Zimbabwe.
White farmers are under persecution in Zimbabwe. In June 2009 there were only 100 of them left. Is it all about land redistribution, in order for the injustices of the colonization era to be rectified, when white farmers owned the best pieces of land, as president Mugabe claims? Or is it about the wiping out of the white population, a reverse racism, a political game so that he can remain in power? This is a documentary where there are ‘no good guys’ apart from the tortured people of Zimbabwe. It’s the image of Africa’s ex-granary that became synonymous with poverty, inflation, corruption, electoral fraud, violence and oppression.
Twenty years ago, Zimbabwe’s government seized white-owned commercial farms and gave them to black war veterans.
Those white farmers say they are still waiting for compensation from the government.
Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa reports from Harare.
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