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Zimbabwe Says Black Elite
Also Getting White Farms

By Andile Ntingi
9-3-2

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's justice minister acknowledged on Tuesday that the country's ruling elite was also benefiting from seizures of land from white farmers intended mainly to help landless black peasants.
 
Patrick Chinamasa said on a South African public radio talkshow that the controversial land reforms benefited everyone, be they senior members of the ruling ZANU-PF party or supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
 
"There are pieces of land which are being subdivided and given to people who apply. It does not matter whether these are people in the leadership of the ZANU-PF or not," he said.
 
"We have bankers who have benefited, lecturers from universities have benefited, we've got even opposition members who have benefited from the land program. As long as they are black they are entitled to benefit," he said.
 
President Robert Mugabe says the reforms are designed to reverse a colonial legacy that left 70 percent of the best land in the hands of a tiny white minority at independence in 1980.
 
The Unites States recently cited the distribution of seized commercial farms to Mugabe's friends and allies, including his wife, Grace, as a reason to oppose the program.
 
The seizures, backed by an order to 2,900 of the 4,500 white farmers to stop farming by August 8, have been cited as a factor in the country's drought-fueled food crisis, which affects about six million of its 13 million people.
 
Chinamasa contested this, saying those white farmers who grew maize rather than cash crops like tobacco and cotton used it to feed their livestock rather than hungry black Zimbabweans.
 
"The shortage which the region is experiencing has not been caused by the land program, but by what we all know, the drought which is afflicting the whole region," he said.
 
Chinamasa's comments came a day after Mugabe launched a scathing attack against British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the Johannesburg Earth Summit.
 
"Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe," he said in an address to more than 100 heads of government.
 
"START NOW"
 
Chinamasa urged South Africa to follow Zimbabwe's lead. "My advice to South Africa is start now, don't wait until the pressures are too overwhelming," he said.
 
"If you think that in South Africa you will be freed from what is happening in Zimbabwe and you don't anticipate those changes, I feel sorry for you because as things are South African blacks are in a worse situation than Zimbabweans."
 
The land crisis in Zimbabwe, which started in 2000 when black militants invaded white farmland, has fueled volatility of the South African rand currency.
 
But South African President Thabo Mbeki, though criticized for doing too little to rein Mugabe in, has said repeatedly that his government will never allow land seizures.
 
South Africa is running parallel land reform programs to return land taken from blacks under apartheid and redistribute some land held by whites at the end of white rule in 1994.
 
 
 
Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.






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