A group of Dutch farmers who were forced off their land in Zimbabwe has launched a campaign to force Harare to pay them compensation.
The group lost their land between 2000 and 2002 when supporters of President Robert Mugabe occupied white-owned farms in an often violent land redistribution campaign. They did not receive any compensation which the group claimed was a violation of the Investment Protection Agreement (IBO) which the Netherlands had made with Zimbabwe.
Landmark court case
They took their case to the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a Washington-based court which operates under the aegis of the World Bank. The ICSID ruled in their favour in 2009 and ordered Zimbabwe to pay them 8.8 million euros compensation, to be increased by 10 percent for each year since the land grab. The group are now entitled to a sum of more 23 million euros.
Broken promise
The Netherlands has been pressuring Zimbabwe over the past two years to fulfil its international obligations. The Ministry of Economic Affairs appointed a special envoy in 2010 who has since travelled regularly to Zimbabwe to negotiate with government officials. Earlier this year, Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Tendai Biti promised to put forward a payment proposal. So far he has not honoured this promise despite being asked to do so in a letter from the Dutch Foreign Minister in August.
"We wanted to take action earlier, but decided to wait for Biti's proposal," the group's chairman Lion Benjamins told Dutch daily de Volkskrant. "But now we're sick of waiting, so have decided to take steps to show Zimbabwe we're serious."
Sanctions
The group has launched the website Justice Zimbabwe and is lobbying European parliamentarians to ensure that the EU refuse to lift its sanctions on Zimbabwe until the compensation is paid. They also hope to persuade the Dutch government to use its right of veto if Zimbabwe asks the Paris Club for debt relief.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs says it supports the farmers but is "not in a position to take over the payment".
The group is also active in the UK, lobbying the government to release frozen Mugabe regime assets in order to pay the compensation.
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The actions of those farmers will also help to prevent similar land grabs occurring in South Africa and one can only hope that eventually Rhodesian farmers will be allowed back on their land so that the country can once again feed itself.
And racist white imperialsm makes a come back in Africa.
Without the talent, skills, knowledge, experience and creativity of whites, South Afrika and Zimbabwe will eventually collapse. Will then be like Congo, Sudan, and Rwanda.
Without the talent, knowledge, skills, creativity and resourcefulness of whites, Zimbabwe and Sud Afrika will eventually collapse and be more like Congo, Sudan and Mali.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/challenging-western-distortions-about-zimbabwe -s-land-reform/
A link to an article about land reform in Zimbabwe; according to the article:
"Agricultural productivity, we are so often told, has been dismal since the launch of fast track land reform. The not always unstated implication of Western reports is that the land would have been best left in the hands of the few wealthy commercial landowners, as only they were capable of producing bountiful outputs. That view is a manifestation of the free market philosophy that is so comforting to the entitled: that the greatest good should go to the privileged few. From that vantage point, the many who suffer the consequences of an extreme and narrow concentration of wealth are deemed unworthy of consideration. There has indeed been a decline in agricultural production in recent years, although for varied and complex reasons. Certainly one of the key factors responsible for the decline is that Zimbabwe’s entire economy has shrunk by around 40 percent since the year 2000. By abandoning the destructive Western-initiated structural adjustment program, and then by accelerating land reform efforts in order to achieve a more equitable distribution of land, Zimbabwe triggered Western hostility. Neoliberal sensitivities were offended, and punishment was not long in coming. By late 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which instructed U.S. officials in international financial institutions to “oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” The U.S. wields enormous influence in the decisions of the IMF, World Bank and other international financial institutions. Great Britain and other Western countries were of like mind, and Zimbabwe found itself shut out of the kind of normal credit operations that are essential for any modern economy to operate.
Western meddling did not stop there, and the net effect was to cause the Zimbabwean economy to take a nosedive, a trend which unavoidably had an adverse impact on agricultural operations. Agriculture does not exist in isolation. In myriad ways it is interrelated to the general economy, and it cannot remain unperturbed by a deep economic downturn. For all of their expressed concern for Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivity, Western leaders must bear a major portion of the responsibility for its decline. But then, that is what sanctions are intended to do: sow economic ruin in the target nation. Another not insignificant factor in the decline of crop production is that much of the region in which Zimbabwe is situated is especially susceptible to the effects of climate change, and over the last decade there has been a sharp increase in the frequency of major drought conditions. According to the AIAS, “the period from 2001-2005 was characterized by poor rainfall distribution, the worst in the post-independence period.” (6) As this chart illustrates, rainfall and agricultural production in Zimbabwe track quite closely. Maize is measured in the chart, as this is the staple crop in Zimbabwe."
'And also contrary to claims in teh western press there was never any period in the history of Zimbabwe where white farmers were respomsible for the vast majority of food production for local consumption:
'Western media have distorted the pre-land reform picture as well. Contrary to the rosy picture painted of the apartheid-era inherited land ownership pattern, most commercial farms focused on export crops such as tobacco, while the bulk of food for domestic use was grown by communal farmers. In more than half of the years in the two decades preceding fast track land reform, Zimbabwe needed to import food. (9) It is simply untrue that the import of food is a new development in Zimbabwe’s history.' http://www.globalresearch.ca/challenging-western-distortions-about-zimbabwe -s-land-reform/
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