by Bob Seery

Created on: March 22, 2009

The so-called 'landmark' ruling of the SADC Tribunal is hilarity compounded. It stretches incredulity that white farmers expect their vast acres of prime arable land which their forebears had acquired at gunpoint, prior to establishing an apartheid state, to be repatriated on account of a 'racially discriminatory' land policy. It redefines hypocrisy, it really does.

When Blair's Labour came to power in 97' they soon disowned their, and by extension the UK's, commitments to fund land reform in Zimbabwe, as accepted under the terms of the 1980 Lancaster House Agreement, by arguing that they were a 'working class movement' unlike the Conservatives who were derived from the 'landed propertied class'. Why, they must have argued, should the British taxpayer be forced to bail out the Rhodesian unilateralists? And so, with a vanishingly negligible degree of moral introspection a conclusion was drawn that this historical party difference somehow absolved them of their obligations to prevent a bloody agrarian revolution. This shift in position became clear even before the 2000 Fast Track Land Resettlement as evidenced by their 1998 Donor's Conference assertion that compensation was 'beyond the capacity of any individual nation'. Talk about cleaning your hands of Empire.

Anyway, I actually agree with Claire Short; there shouldn't be any question of compensation. The British South Africa Company conquered on behalf of the Crown via their Matlin machine-gun massacre of the Shona/Ndebele uprising of 1897 and then sold concessions to Rhodes brigands - who ever since have enjoyed the fruits of the land's produce. If objective justice were a tangible entity the 'compensation' would be the other way round. In fact, were it up to me I'd have blocked their passage, swathed them in chains and demanded a 100 years servitude from them and their offspring.

After the expiry of the ten-year willing-seller-willing buyer' clause land reform proposals in the Zimbabwean parliament have, by necessity, involved the abrogation of private property rights - a fact, cynically deployed by would-be donors to forestall correcting an historical injustice. We can scarcely fund a programme that contravenes our own laws on private property', remarked the US ambassador at the time.

The current constitution of Zimbabwe was compiled under the scrutiny of British negotiators and representatives of the former Rhodesian government at the Lancaster talks and thus bears the imprimatur of a colonial era compromise

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