• • If the Zimbabwe government does not undertake actions in accordance with the recommendations above, take further steps to bring pressure to bear on the government to ensure that it does so. Assist civil society groups in Zimbabwe, including human rights groups, to continue monitoring and reporting on abuses, in particular in the rural areas. III. BACKGROUND Land Reform in the Twenty Years After Independence Land has been a source of political conflict in Zimbabwe since colonization, when the country was known as Rhodesia, both within indigenous black communities and especially between white settlers and the black rural communities. Under British colonial rule and under the white minority government that in 1965 unilaterally declared its independence from Britain, white Rhodesians seized control of the vast majority of good agricultural land, leaving black peasants to scrape a living from marginal “tribal reserves.” An end to white minority rule came after a protracted war of liberation in which land was a major issue, but was ultimately negotiated through talks brokered by the British government that led to a settlement known as the Lancaster House Agreement, and then to elections in 1980. Robert Mugabe, leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZanuPF), the dominant liberation movement, won a resounding victory. However, the new government was bound by “sunset clauses” in the Lancaster House Agreement that gave special protections to white Zimbabweans for the first ten years of independence. These included provisions that the new government would not engage in any compulsory land acquisition and that when land was acquired the government would “pay promptly adequate compensation” for the property. Land distribution would take place in terms of “willing buyer, willing seller.” (From 1985, every vendor of land was required to obtain from the government a “certificate of no present interest” in the acquisition of the land concerned before going ahead with the sale.) Released from the constraints of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1990, the Zanu-PF government amended the provisions of the constitution concerning property rights. Compulsory acquisition of land for redistribution and resettlement became possible. In 1992, the Land Acquisition Act also gave the government strengthened powers to acquire land for resettlement, subject to the payment of “fair” compensation fixed by a committee of six persons using set (nonmarket) guidelines, including powers to limit the size of farms and introduce a land tax. A 1994 land tenure commission also recommended that the best way to achieve vital redistribution was through a land tax, though no tax was in fact put in place.1 Despite the new laws, the government land acquisition and resettlement in practice slowed down. In the first decade of independence, the government acquired 40 percent of the target of eight million hectares, resettling more than 50,000 families on more than three million hectares.2 By the end of the second decade of independence, the pace of land reform had declined. Less than one million hectares was acquired for distribution during the 1990s and fewer than 20,000 families resettled. 3 Budgetary allocations showed that land acquisition was not a government priority during these years. By the end of what became known as “phase one” of the land reform and resettlement program in 1997, the government had resettled 71,000 families (against a target of 162,000) on almost 3.5 million hectares of land. 4 Only 19 percent of this was classed as prime land, the rest was either marginal, or unsuitable for grazing or cultivation. 5 About 400 black elite farmers were leasing 400,000 hectares of state land, and about 350 black 1 The commission was known as the Rukuni Commission, after its chair, Professor Mandiyamba Rukuni of the University of Zimbabwe Department of Agricultural and Extension Services. 2 Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions, Land, Housing and Property Rights in Zimbabwe (Geneva: COHRE, September 2001), available at www.cohre.org, p.16, accessed November 10, 2001. 3 Ibid. 4 Technical Committee of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Resettlement and Rural Development and the National Economic Consultative Forum Land Reform Task Force, Inception Phase Framework Plan: 1999 to 2000, An Implementation Plan of the Land Reform and Resettlement Programme – Phase 2 (Harare: Government of Zimbabwe, undated (1998)), paragraph 1.2. 5 Tapera Knox Chitiyo, “Land Violence and Compensation: Reconceptualising Zimbabwe’s Land and War Veterans’ Debate,” Track Two Occasional Paper, vol. 9, no. 1, (Cape Town: Centre for Conflict Resolution, May 2000), p.16. Human Rights Watch 6 March 2002, Vol. 14, No. 1 (A)