Michael Gorey

I’ve written a few times about Zimbabwe. Today, there’s a personal touch to the comments I make.

I visited Zimbabwe in 1991 when it was a prosperous happy country and before Mugabe went bananas.

My employer at the time, a Victorian farming newspaper, encouraged me to write some freelance articles about the agricultural situation while I was there.

I made contact with the Commercial Farmers Union and they facilitated several farm visits. My friends, the Apps family at Kwe Kwe, also took me to several farms and farmer meetings.

I remember one at a local hall, attended by 60 or so white farmers, with a black police officer as observer (spy). Everything was friendly though. Nobody at that time felt insecure in any way.

Today I was reading the excellent Zimbabwe Situation web site, which aggregates articles from across the troubled country.

There was an item from Zim Online about the Kirk family. Rilla Kirk worked for the CFU when I visited and took me to her parent’s farm near Harare. I presume it’s the same family.

They were Danish and didn’t have any colonial attitudes. Rilla showed me the modern dairy, and the school, which the family provided for the children of farm workers.

I lost contact after I left Zimbabwe, but when the troubles began I found an email address for the family and learnt that Rilla had moved to Tanzania. It seems her parents and brother stayed. Here is most of the article:

HARARE - The Danish owners of two farms near Harare have asked the High Court to compel President Robert Mugabe’s government to uphold an investment protection agreement with Copenhagen by prohibiting a court judge and a former soldier from seizing portions of their farms.

In an application in which State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi and Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri are cited as respondents, the Danes want the court to order the government to remove High Court Judge Chinembiri Bhunu and George Manhiwa from parts of their Marirangwe and Aldington farms.

The application, which also cites Bhunu, Manhiwa and Attorney General Sobhuza Gula-Ndebele as respondents, was filed on December 2. It has not yet been set for hearing.

Bhunu last month seized 269.67 hectares of land on Aldington while Manhiwa took 205 hectares on Marirangwe. The two said they were taking the land because it was offered to them by the government in terms of the Land Acquisition Act that allows the state to seize white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.

But the Danes, Lisbeth and Mads Kirk, argue in papers filed with the court that their farms cannot be expropriated or nationalised in terms of a 1996 bilateral agreement between Zimbabwe and Denmark.

In her affidavit to court, Lisbeth said Article 3 of the agreement obliged the Harare administration to give Danish investors "fair and equitable treatment…. encompassing basic right to protection of investment."

She added that Article 5(1) of the same agreement specifically provided that investments and properties of investors from the two countries, "shall not be nationalised, expropriated or subjected to measures having effect equivalent to nationalisation or expropriation."

The Kirks - whose appeal is the first time a foreign investor has attempted to challenge in court Harare’s frequent disregard of bilateral commitments during its land redistribution exercise - want the court to nullify the seizure of their land by the state and to order Bhunu and Manhiwa off their farms.

Gula-Ndebele, the government’s chief lawyer, could not be reached yesterday to establish how the state would plead in court.

Mugabe’s government has however in the past publicly said it would abide by all bilateral commitments although on the ground allowing hordes of its supporters to invade whatever farm they so wished regardless of whether it was covered by an investment protection agreement.

And the seizure of portions of the two Danish-owned dairy and crop producing farms is part of a fresh wave of farm invasions that has seen more than 60 of the few remaining white farmers driven off their land in the past four months.

This, despite calls by influential Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono and Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa on farm invasions to stop to allow the mainstay agricultural sector to recover and spur economic growth.

All I can do is close my eyes, hope and pray that this country will one day be happy again. It’s a shame there’s no oil in Zimbabwe, or international terrorists. Maybe Bush and Blair would take the situation more seriously if there was.

These articles might be of interest:

• Britain should invade Zimbabwe
• Zimbabwe Situation
• Zimbabwe inflation