Ethics Newsline®

HARARE, Zimbabwe
Hundreds of white farmers in Zimbabwe were arrested last week for defying government demands that they leave their lands by August 8 — part of a land redistribution program the government says will correct colonial-era wrongs.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has evicted 2,900 whites from their farms. Those who refuse face up to two years in prison and a fine, reported Britain’s Independent newspaper.

Press reports note that roughly 60 percent of the white farmers have refused to move, resistance that has sparked arrests, beatings, looting, and destruction of their property.

The controversial policy advocated by the Mugabe government comes at a disastrous time, with eviction notices arriving at the same time as planting season. The result: fallow fields and rotting crops at a time when half of the nation’s 12.5 million people face a sever hunger crisis, according to the United Nations.

The Mugabe administration insists that the redistribution policy is needed to correct colonial-era imbalances that left 4,500 whites with one-third of the nation’s farmland and seven million blacks with the rest, reported the Associated Press.

Dispossessed farmers say it may be about something else: political suppression. Evicted farmer Roy Bennett said his loyal black workers, including children, were beaten and tortured by Mugabe’s forces for supporting opposition politicians.

“The crisis in Zimbabwe is not just about the white farming community,” Bennett, a parliamentary member of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), told the Independent. “Mugabe’s mobs are attacking thousands of black farm workers who support the opposition MDC, in a systematic attempt to crush the opposition to his rule.”

“There is nobody in their right mind who would oppose agrarian land reform for the betterment of the people. What is being done is not land reform, it is suppression of another view,” Bennett alleged.