Zimbabwe Grapples With Land Seizures
MAZOWE, Zimbabwe — The police came early one morning five years ago, catching villagers by surprise as they worked in their fields. As hundreds of anti-riot police officers jumped down from their vehicles, their commander issued an order.
“He said that mother and daughter Grace Mugabe wanted this place,” recalled a village leader, Denboy Chaparadza. “So you better move away.”
Grace Mugabe, the wife of Robert Mugabe, who was ousted from power in November after 37 years as Zimbabwe’s leader, and their daughter, Bona, coveted the villagers’ land. The Mugabes already owned property and businesses in Mazowe, about 40 kilometers north of Harare, the capital, and they were eager to expand.
Before the villagers could object, the police demolished their houses. “They left us out in the open,” Mr. Chaparadza said. “We felt betrayed.”
Despite the destruction, most villagers refused to leave, and over the years, they resisted police harassment and beatings.
One reason the 146 families who lived in Mazowe felt betrayed was that they themselves had seized the land from a white farmer in 2000, under Mr. Mugabe’s fast-track land reform program. Now, they risked los- ing everything to his wife and daughter: 1,260 hectares of prime land, known by the locals as Arnolds Farm, for farming and cattle ranching.
As Zimbabwe embarks on its post-Mugabe era, the unresolved issue of land ownership remains at the heart of its future, just as it was at the time of independence, in 1980.
In the talks leading to independence from white- minority rule, Mr. Mugabe was pressured into an agreement that left land ownership unsettled. In what was and remains an agricultural economy, the nation’s most productive farmland belonged to a few thousand white settlers.
Resolving the land issue, including compensating white farmers whose properties were later seized, is critical to repairing relations with Western nations and international lenders. The new government needs Western assistance to revive the economy.
Determining who owns the land is a necessary step to development and democratization in Zimbabwe. Nearly all Zimbabweans who benefited from the land policy lack titles, leaving them at the mercy of the politically powerful.
In his inauguration speech, Presi- dent Emmerson Mnangagwa — who, with his military allies, ousted Mr. Mugabe, 93, — said that “repossessing our land cannot be challenged or reversed.” But he said that he was “committed to compensating those farmers from whom land was taken.”
Mr. Mnangagwa was indicating his support for the steps taken by the government. To qualify for loans from international creditors, government officials had begun mapping the 6,000 farms that were seized after the program started in the late 1990s.
But as Mr. Mugabe’s longtime right- hand man, he is believed to have overseen the former leader’s often violent land policy. Land remains a tool of political control, one that Mr. Mnangagwa and other leaders of the governing ZANU-PF party have never shown a willingness to relinquish.
“I’m a bit skeptical,” Moses Donsa Nkomo, a lawyer with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, who represented the villagers in Mazowe, said of Mr. Mnangagwa’s pledge. “That is the system that has kept them in power until now.”
Since Mr. Mugabe’s ouster, the raids in Mazowe have ceased. The villagers have lived as subsistence farmers since seizing Arnolds Farm in 2000, but they did not get the titles necessary to secure bank loans. They cannot afford the equipment needed to extricate themselves from subsistence farming, and their dependence on the party that has ruled Zimbabwe since independence.
Mr. Chaparadza said that as part of any resolution of the land issue, the new government should compensate white farmers. “Even if they come back, that’s fine as long as they give us another place,” he said. “We won’t deny them. What we need is only some land where we can survive — and title to the land.”