Britain 'not legally obliged to compensate Zimbabwe farmers'
Britain 'not legally obliged to compensate Zimbabwe farmers'
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Thursday, 02, Jul 2009 12:55
Britain has no legal obligation to compensate white commercial farmers for land grabbed by President Robert Mugabe's allies, the UK's outgoing ambassador to Zimbabwe, Andrew Pocock, has said.
Mr Pocock rejected the president's position that a 1979 Lancaster House agreement in Britain means Zimbabwe's former colonial power is still mandated to compensate white farmers for land seized under the veteran leaders' land reform programme in 2000.
"In the fairly recent past, the Zimbabwean government has said that compensation rests with the United Kingdom. Well it does not - either legally or morally," Mr Pocock said in an interview with the private radio station, SW Radio.
The SW Radio station broadcasts outside Zimbabwe's borders due to being banned in the country.
Mr Pocock added: "In Lancaster House, sovereignty was transferred to the Zimbabwean government.
"The disruption on the farms in 2000 was not caused by anything to do with the United Kingdom; it was driven by Zimbabwean government policy. Therefore we have no legal obligation for compensation. We've never accepted that, and we won't."
At the Lancaster House talks, Britain agreed to fund the land reform on a 'willing buyer, willing seller principle', where farmers who were unwilling to stay in Zimbabwe would be bought out by funds provided by the British through the Zimbabwean government.
Under the agreement, the new Zimbabwean government could not seize European-owned land for the first ten years of independence.
Mr Pocock said: "What Lancaster House said and what we undertook then was (a) to do everything we could to help with land reform (b) to contribute substantially ourselves and (c) to seek support from others in the international community. Now, we did all that, so this is really again another urban or rural myth that we need at some early stage to lay to rest."
Zimbabwe's last remaining white commercial farmers who face prosecution for resisting eviction are demanding US$15 billion each as compensation to voluntarily vacate their farms.
The evictions of the remaining white commercial farmers are also in defiance of a ruling by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal that has said the farm seizures are illegal.
Evictions of white commercial farmers since 2000 have Zimbabwe's agricultural sector to its knees.
Food shortages are a mirror of the failure of Mugabe's land reform since the new black farmers had no agricultural expertise or agricultural inputs to farm on a large scale to meet the food requirements of the nation.