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The Legal Monitor - Issue 21
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR)
November 16, 2009

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Real victims of land reform

Farm workers suffered a hundred times more for every abuse meted on a single farmer during Zimbabwe's turbulent land reform programme, according to a new report by the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union (GAPWUZ).

Widespread deaths, beatings, displacements and torture endured by farm workers have largely gone unnoticed, as the media and lobbyists focus more on the plight of 4 500 commercial farmers, according to the report, which noted that "quantitatively, farm workers as a group outnumber farmers by a factor of 100 to 1".

The report, titled: 'The invisible suffering of commercial farm workers and their families due to Land Reform', highlights the torment that farm workers have gone through at the hands of the State and pro-government civilian militias driving a land reform programme characterised by violence, corruption, and general chaos.

Without the financial muscle to lobby for their case, farm workers, now mostly migrant and displaced in the ongoing wave of violent farm invasions, have become the forgotten victims.

"International media around the world focussed on pictures of white farmers being attacked, murdered or evicted, whilst their workers were barely mentioned. However, for every one white farmer there were over a hundred workers who suffered more violations of a worse nature than their employer did," read the 56-page report.

Most of the more than 1.8 million farm workers and their families did not benefit from the land reform programme, despite representing 12 to 16 percent of Zimbabwe's total population. New owners lack the capacity to farm productively to retain the services of farm workers, leaving them jobless.

In addition, the sustained and systematic psychological and physical assault has continued as new owners intensify evictions of farm workers whom they suspect to be sympathetic to former dispossessed commercial farmers.

Displacement of farm workers is still rampant, leaving thousands, including children and pregnant women destitute and risking disease and life, according to the report. Ongoing displacements, the report notes, have a xenophobic focus and migrant workers with no rural homes to retreat to are hardest hit.

"It is the view of this report that the significant proportion of farm workers with historical family links to other countries has been one of the causes for the entire group of farm workers being treated as second class citizens, and has served as justification to their oppressors for their disenfranchisement, exclusion, physical and psychological assault," read the report.

The GAPWUZ report notes that "all" perpetrators of land reform abuses "are connected to the State, directly or indirectly".

The police, which was supposed to stop the abuses, was actively involved in the harassment of farm workers. A significant percentage of violations were committed by the police or unformed security personnel, according to the report.

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