PATRICK CHINAMASA . . . Zimbabwe's Justice Minister

HARARE – Zimbabwe’s farm workers’ union will this month ask the SADC Tribunal to order Harare to stop rights abuses against farm labourers who the union says have borne the brunt of a violent drive by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to seize the few remaining white-owned farms.

Impeccable sources told ZimOnline that the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) took the decision to approach the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal after repeated attempts to persuade the Harare coalition government to protect farm workers failed.

“A position (to approach the SADC Tribunal) has been taken, and what is remaining is for our lawyers to finalise the legal aspects of the application,” said a union official, who spoke on condition she was not named.

GAPWUZ information officer Tapiwa Zivira declined to take questions on the matter saying: “I have no authority at the moment to confirm any such developments yet.”

Both Attorney General Johannes Tomana and Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa – hardliner allies of Mugabe who have backed farm invasions before – were not immediately available for comment on the matter.

But Chinamasa has previously said Zimbabwe is not bound by Tribunal judgments because it no longer recognises the regional court, a position shot down last week by High Court Bharat Patel.

Patel, who was hearing an application by a group of white farmers to have last year’s ruling by the Namibia-based Tribunal outlawing Mugabe’s controversial land reforms registered and enforced in Zimbabwe, said Harare was bound by the judgments of the regional court.

But the judge declined registering the Tribunal order saying its enforcement would be against public policy in Zimbabwe. The white farmers have said they will appeal against Patel’s ruling at the Supreme Court.

Tribunal judgments must be registered with the High Court to be enforced in Zimbabwe.

GAPWUZ says farm workers have suffered the worst from Mugabe’s chaotic and bloody land reforms which saw more than 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s white farmers driven off the land and their properties parceled out to blacks.

A report released by the union last November chronicled cases of gross rights violations including torture and murder committed against farm labourers by mobs of war veterans and supporters of Mugabe’s ZANU PF party.

The report said a new wave farm disturbances that began almost immediately after formation the formation last February of a unity government by Mugabe and former opposition leader now Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai had by last November rendered over 4 000 farm workers jobless and homeless.

The majority of workers on white commercial farms are originally from Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique and have nowhere else to go once evicted from the farms that are their home and place of work.

Zivira described the situation of former workers displaced from commercial farms as dire. “They are risking disease, hunger and death everyday and the more we delay in getting them assistance the more grave their situation becomes,” he said.

The decade-long farm invasions which Mugabe says were necessary to ensure blacks also had access to arable land that they were denied by previous white-led governments have been blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages.

Once a net food exporter Zimbabwe has avoided mass starvation over the past decade only because international relief agencies were quick to chip in with food handouts. – ZimOnline