16 in the other months. As the Human Rights Forum commented, “this would seem to speak to two different but complementary systems of repression in operation: one that is focused upon elections (and the critical issue of political power), and another that is focused on the suppression of dissent”. Both patterns would seem to have applied to the commercial farms, although the data available in all reports do not show violations on commercial farms as a distinct category. Irrespective of the general trends, the hostile attitude of the Zanu(PF) government to the commercial farmers has remained consistent since 2000. Even as late as September 2005, Didymus Mutasa, the Minister for State Security and Land Reform, could state that all remaining white farmers must be “cleared out”. As he said, “Operation Murambatsvina should also be applied to the land reform programme to clean the commercial farms that are still in the hands of white farmers. White farmers are dirty and should be cleared out. They are similar to the filth that was in the streets before Murambatsvina”. 28 By the end of 2005, most commercial farmers had been evicted from their farms – close on 4,000 of the 4,500 orginal commercial farmers - and hundreds of thousands of farm worker lost their jobs and their homes as the land acquisition process accelerated during 2003 and 2004. The hardships experienced by these farm worker families have been well-documented in a number of reports, 29 and these findings will not be repeated here. In fact, the history of land reform since 2000 is a litany of violence and hardship, and as one commentator has put it, it could all have been achieved without any such violence or hardship: …radical land reform could have been achieved within the framework of the law and without the destructive chaos and lawlessness that has accompanied the government-orchestrated farm invasions and its ‘fast-track’ land grab. 30 What is evident though, is that there has been no comprehensive assessment of the violations that took place on the commercial farms since 2000, nor any comprehensive assessment of the consequences of these violations on the farmers, the farm workers and their families. Nor has 28 Source: The Standard, 18 September 2005. 29 30 See THE IMPACT OF LAND REFORM ON COMMERCIAL FARM WORKERS’ LIVELIHOODS. March 2001. Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe; Report on Assessment of the Impact of Land Reform Programme on Commercial Farm Worker Livelihoods May 2002. Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe; The Situation of Commercial Farm Workers after Land Reform in Zimbabwe. A report prepared for the Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe, by Lloyd M Sachikonye. March 2003. See Feltoe, G. (2004), The onslaught against democracy and the rule of law in Zimbabwe in 2000, in D. Harold-Berry [ed], Zimbabwe: The Past is the Present. Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis, HARARE: WEAVER PRESS. A Preliminary Report on Human Rights Violations on Commercial Farms, 2000 to 2005.