Zimbabwe Confirms Plans To Turn Over White-Owned Farms To Black Peasants

Zimbabwe’s government will press ahead with plans to seize more than 1,000 mostly white-owned farms and hand them over to landless black peasants, President Robert Mugabe said Wednesday.

The confiscations will proceed despite a refusal by Britain, the former colonial power, to help pay compensation to the descendants of British settlers.

“It’s the land we want, that we must find, have found and will designate” for resettlement, Mugabe said after a two-hour meeting with the head of the 4,500-member Commercial Farmers Union, Nick Swanepoel, and the organization’s executive director, David Hasluck.

Mugabe said he told the CFU leaders that the “colonial exercise” of land ownership would be “corrected once and for all.”

An initial list of 1,503 targeted properties is expected to be published in an official legal notice Friday. Last month, the government said 1,772 mostly white-owned farms totaling 12 million acres were being selected for resettlement.

Mugabe said then that the government would pay farmers only for buildings and improvements and nothing for land seized by settlers from black peasants when confiscation begins this year.

Britain said it could not support the land seizures, which it said abandoned ownership rights and were unlikely to alleviate poverty.

Since independence in 1980, the government has bought more than 1,800 farms under “willing seller-willing buyer” deals. Only 46 farms have been forced sales, but the government paid the full market price for them.

White farmers still own about a third of the nation’s land, with about 8 million peasants on another third, and the rest in nature parks or unsuitable for farming.