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CNN Live Today

In Zimbabwe, Battle Over Land Heating Up

Aired August 14, 2002 - 11:29   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: We go now to the African nation of Zimbabwe. A battle over land is heating up there. Today, black militants with clubs and rocks started evicting a white farmer from his land is the northeastern part of the country. President Robert Mugabe has called for white farmers to leave their land so that those farms can be reassigned to black settlers.
Hundreds of farmers have defied an August 8 deadline, and this week, Mr. Mugabe did say that white farmers who cooperate with the government be allowed to keep some of their land.

Lyndsey Hilsum has more on this long-running dispute.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LYNDSEY HILSUM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The last task for farm laborers before they lose their jobs, packing up the belongings of the white farmers the Zimbabwe government evicted from the land. The Norton family has been here for two generations.

LARRY NORTON, FARMER: The thing we certainly don't want is sympathy. The people who really need the sympathy are the workers left with no jobs, no infrastructure, no backup.

HILSUM: Since June, farm machinery has remained idle. Many haven't work planted yet for fear of prosecution, but say they won't leave the land.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If the police come and they try and beat us up, they will have to do that. But they've got to remember that I have a thousand people there. We have to continue. We have to continue farming. We have to feed the nation.

HILSUM: Zimbabwe used to export grain the to rest of Africa. Now millions of Zimbabweans depend on food aid, the result of drought, economic mismanagement and the land seizure program.

Cueing has become a way of life, cueing for maze, salt, here for sugar. It can take all day. And sometimes you get nothing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS: Zimbabwe's government says the land seizure effort is a final effort to correct colonial area imbalances in land ownership. But critics say it's nothing more than an effort by Mr. Mugabe to hold on to power. Griffin Shea is a correspondent for Ejans France (ph) Press. He joins us now by phone from the Zimbabwe capitol of Harare (ph) this morning.

Griffin, can you give us some confirmation of some of the reports we have seen in the papers here. I have seen estimates here that say estimates that 1 percent of the white -- of the population, which would be the white farm owners, own 70 to 50 percent of the land. What do you know of that?

GRIFFIN SHEA, JOURNALIST: It is true that the white population owns a disproportionate amount of land in Zimbabwe. Of the total area in Zimbabwe, I think it's more about 30 percent of the land is still owned by whites, 22 years after white rule ended in Zimbabwe.

The problem is that a lot of that land is some of the best farmland in the country, so a lot of people, and the majority here, feel that that land should be redistributed to the blacks, and there's very little dispute about that, but Mugabe's critics say he's been using this to basically hand out farms to his supporters and using it as vehicle to commit acts of political violence against opponents.

HARRIS: Is there proof of that at this particular point. As I understand it, this distribution program has been going on for some two years now. What do the numbers say about Mr. Mugabe and who's been getting the land? Has it been his cronies?

SHEA: It's very difficult to judge from the outside. The farmers say that they've compiled a list of about 80 government officials, military officials, ruling party officials, who have gotten land. But there is very little transparency in the program, so it's hard for someone outside to go in and ask government for a list of exactly who has benefited. They do publish names in the paper, but it is very difficult to confirm, and even the lists that they publish for the general population, they admit aren't a complete list of who is getting land.

HARRIS: I have heard that Mr. Mugabe saying farmers should be compensated for their land if they turn it over, but that Zimbabwe shouldn't do the compensating, that Britain should do the compensating. What's the thought on that?

SHEA: Britain and the United States and several other international donors had agreed in '98 to fund land redistribution program that would not only pay farmers for their land, but would provide support for the new farmers going on to the land, so that they could irrigate their crops, have fertilizer, have fertilizer, have good seeds to plant with. But the donors don't want to fund the program, because it's been derailed by so much political violence over the last two years, and it's very tied into the election campaigns we have had here.

After the March presidential elections here, the United States and Britain and most of the European countries impose sanctions on Mugabe and most members of his inner circle in government and in the ruling party, because of what they said was, you know, completely unjustifiable political violence and widespread claims of fraud during the elections.

HARRIS: We know this country is already dealing with the problem of feeding its people as things stand right now. If farmers are pushed off their land and crops not put into the ground in a timely fashion, what happens to one, the rest of the population with food, and two, what happens to the workers who have been working these farms?

SHEA: The workers are very seldom mentioned in the land reform program, and there are more than a million effected by just this first round of evictions, which is only about 50 percent of the total. Those workers will have to either hope to get some land themselves, but so far they haven't been catered for in any way, or they are just going to join the ranks of the unemployed, who already figure about 60 percent of Zimbabwe's workforce.

For the food, it just makes the situation worse, because the planting season here begins in about two months. So if the crops aren't into the ground now, there's not going to be a complete harvest when the next harvest rolls around in March. Zimbabwe is likely to have to depend again on international aid and on whatever imports the government can find money to bring in from other countries.

HARRIS: So the seed has been sown for a manmade famine and employment disaster in Zimbabwe. We'll have to watch how this situation unfolds.

Griffen Shea, thank you very much. We appreciate your time and your insights this morning.

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