- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- Chinamasa's comments came a day after Mugabe launched
a scathing attack against British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the Johannesburg
Earth Summit.
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- "Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe,"
he said in an address to more than 100 heads of government.
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- "START NOW"
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- The land crisis in Zimbabwe, which started in 2000 when
black militants invaded white farmland, has fueled volatility of the South
African rand currency.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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