FORMER Malaysian Premier Mahathir Mohamad

HARARE – The Malaysian government on Tuesday protested to Harare over the seizure by a former top army general of a Malaysian-owned banana farm in eastern Zimbabwe.

Charge de Affairs at the Kuala Lumpur’s embassy in Harare, Mohamad Nizan Mohamad, told journalists in Harare that Vice President John Nkomo promised to take the matter to President Robert Mugabe – a friend of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

“The issue of our existing investments and how they have been affected was raised and the response was positive and encouraging,” Mohamad said after meeting Nkomo yesterday. “We were assured by the Vice President that our matter would be taken to the President.”

Retired major general Edzai Chimonyo last January seized the banana farm in Burma Valley in the eastern Manicaland province, claiming he was allocated the property in 2006 under Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme.

The banana farm is owned by Matanuska, a farming organisation owned by Malaysian investors and is protected under a bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement (BIPPA) between Harare and Kuala Lumpur.

The Malaysians also own several other agro-business projects in Manicaland and Mashonaland Central provinces that has some of Zimbabwe’s best agricultural land.

Mohamad said the Asian investors had made significant investment on the land and were planning to expand operations once the dispute over ownership of the banana farm was resolved.

Mugabe’s chaotic and often violent programme to seize white-owned farm land for redistribution to landless blacks also saw several farms owned by foreigners and protected under bilateral trade agreements between Zimbabwe and other countries seized without compensation.

The seizure of private land has raised questions about Zimbabwe’s commitment to uphold property rights as well as agreements entered with other countries.

But the veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has in the past backed seizure of white-owned land including farms protected under bilateral agreements, will be caught in tight in spot over the Malaysian–owned farm given his perceived close ties to the Kuala Lumpur establishment.

Mugabe has not made secret his clearly improbable wish to turn Zimbabwe into the Malaysia of southern Africa.

He has also regularly holidayed in the south east Asian country since the United States and European Union governments banned him and his top allies from their territories as punishment for stealing elections and failure to uphold the rule of law, democracy, human and property rights.

Mugabe’s land reforms that he says were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after he failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.

In addition critics say Mugabe’s cronies in his ZANU PF party and the security establishment – and not ordinary peasants – benefited the most from farm seizures with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy. – ZimOnline