11 land acquisitions, and the question has been continually raised about the necessity for this violence. From the launch of the farm invasions in February 2000, all observers have raised concerns about the violence, and many have suggested that the land reform exercise was in actuality a smokescreen for the winning of elections. 15 Here it is relevant to point out that there may well have been 1 million farm worker voters out of 4.5 million overall voters, and that this was a population that could have strongly affected the outcome of the 2000 Parliamentary elections. 16 Thus, the views that “land reform” might be an electoral strategy were not trivial, especially considering the vulnerability and exposure of this strategic group. The key to this strategy was contained in the draft constitution; the controversial land clause that was inserted after the constitutional process was completed and the acrimonious meeting to agree the final draft. 17 The final draft contained a clause requiring the United Kingdom to compensate commercial farmers for their land, failing which the State would be entitled to acquire these farms without compensation. This clause became the cornerstone for the electoral campaigns for the next three years as well as for the highly successful international campaign waged by the Zimbabwe government. 18 As with all good strategies, the land problem as a strategy was very simple and capable of extension into a wide variety of other areas. It allowed for a wide variety of tactics to be employed in its pursuit, and, above all, could be maintained over a very long period. This last was the greatest value of the strategy: by changing the goals, refusing to allow its solution, and by dragging in an increasing number of protagonists, the land problem could be used infinitely. Importantly, the “land problem” had the possibility of being linked to other problems in very useful ways, and the most important was its linkage to the war veterans, the Liberation War, and the colonial past. For this allowed the government to insert the militia programme right into the centre of the election. Here it must be remembered that some of the war veterans had become deeply discredited in 1997 by the revelations of massive corruption in the pension awards under the War Victims Compensation Fund. The Chidyausiku Commission produced huge public 15 16 17 18 See Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (2001), Politically motivated violence in Zimbabwe 2000–2001. A report on the campaign of political repression conducted by the Zimbabwean Government under the guise of carrying out land reform, HARARE: ZIMABWE HUMAN RIGHTS NGO FORUM. This estimate is based on the understanding that there were 350,000 families of full-time workers, and 250,000 seasonal worker families working on the commercial farms. If it is assumed that there could be at least 2 voters per family, then would seem a conservative estimate, but the actual numbers of potential voters could have been much higher if adult children were taken into account. The final draft contained a clause demanding compensation by the British government for land, failing which the Zimbabwe government would be entitled to alienate land without compensation. See Hammar, A., Raftopoulos. B., & Jensen, S. (2003), Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: 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.