HARARE – The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal will refer Zimbabwe’s land dispute to a summit of regional leaders scheduled for next week after Harare said it no longer recognised the court’s authority to hear the matter.

“We can not disclose anything at the moment but I can confirm that we received the letter from the Zimbabwean government (withdrawing recognition of Tribunal authority) and has referred the matter to the SADC summit for deliberation,” said Dennis Shivavangula, the Tribunal clerk.

“We can not say what will happen to all the proceedings involving the Zimbabwe government until the matter is discussed by the SADC summit.”

The Tribunal last November dealt a heavy body blow to President Robert Mugabe’s controversial programme to seize white-owned farmland for redistribution to landless when it ruled that the chaotic and often violent programme was discriminatory, racist and illegal under the SADC Treaty.

The regional court ordered Harare not to evict the 78 farmers and that it pays full compensation to those it had already forced off farms.

Mugabe publicly dismissed the ruling by the Namibia-based Tribunal while his followers in the military and in his ZANU PF party defied the court order by continuing to seize more land from the few white farmers remaining in Zimbabwe.

And the official Herald newspaper reported on Wednesday that top Mugabe loyalist and Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa had written to the Tribunal to inform it that Zimbabwe had withdrawn from any proceedings involving the regional court. 

The newspaper, which quoted passages from Chinamasa’s letter, said he told the Tribunal that Harare would recognise its authority only after a protocol establishing the court was ratified by at least two-thirds of the 14-nation bloc’s members as is required under rules and procedures governing the regional grouping.??

Chinamasa’s letter appeared calculated to pre-empt any attempts to bring the issue of Harare’s refusal to abide by Tribunal rulings for discussion at the SADC summit taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from September 7 to 8.

Government farm seizures which started in 2000 have resulted in the majority of the about 4 000 white commercial farmers being forcibly ejected from their properties without being paid compensation for the land, which Mugabe has refused to pay for saying it was stolen from blacks in the first place. 

The Harare government has compensated some farmers for developments on the land such as dams, roads and buildings and says it is committed to compensating all farmers for such improvements.

Land redistribution, that Mugabe says was necessary to correct a “unjust and immoral” colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, is blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after Harare failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production. 

Critics say Mugabe’s powerful cronies – and not ordinary peasants – benefited the most from farm seizures with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy.

Poor performance in the mainstay agricultural sector has also had far reaching consequences as hundreds of thousands of workers have lost jobs while the manufacturing sector, starved of inputs from the sector, is operating below 20 percent of capacity.

By Zimonline