African leaders mull Congo withdrawal proposal

Zimbabwe farm occupations still on agenda

April 21, 2000
Web posted at: 2:16 p.m. EDT (1816 GMT)

In this story: Britain calls on Mozambique for help Searching for Congo peace RELATED STORIES, SITES

VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe (CNN) -- African leaders from six nations were meeting in Zimbabwe on Friday, but the early part of their discussion centered on the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and not on Zimbabwe's growing farmland crisis.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's central African nation has been jolted by increasingly violent seizures of white-owned farmland by veterans of the former Rhodesia's war for independence from Great Britain. Mugabe, who has been Zimbabwe's only president since independence in 1980, supports the land grabs because, he says, land ownership in his country is inequitable.

VIDEO In a rare move, the U.S. is publicly criticizing Mugabe, as CNN's Andrea Koppel reports. (April 21) QuickTime Play Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K

But the violence has cost four lives in recent days and shows no signs of abating. The presidents of Mozambique, South Africa and Namibia agreed to meet with Mugabe after the Congo summit to discuss the impact the crisis is having on the region and ways to bring it to an end.

Land redistribution has been on the Zimbabwean agenda for two decades with little success. Mugabe maintains that the land was stolen from Africans during colonial days and rightfully should be returned to them.

But two decades after the bloody race war to free Zimbabwe from white minority rule, some 4,000 white farmers still control much of the country's best farmland, while hundreds of thousands of black peasant farmers continue to wait for land promised them.

Britain calls on Mozambique for help

The current crisis began when Zimbabwe voted "no" in a referendum on a new constitution that would have given Mugabe the power to seize land from white landowners without compensation.

The former colonial power Britain has said it would help fund a program to compensate white farmers for handing land over to Zimbabwe's poor, but it insists that the land occupations end before the land reform issue is tackled.

"It has got to be within the rule of law, and the illegal occupations have got to come to an end," said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

Mugabe has refused to order the veterans off the land, despite a High Court ruling that they must go, prompting the presidents of Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique to agree to discuss the problem with the 76-year-old Zimbabwean leader.

Cook telephoned Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano on Friday, urging him to let Mugabe know that the crisis in Zimbabwe is having a regional effect.

"I hope that President Chissano and his colleagues when they meet President Mugabe will warn him what he is doing is not just damaging Zimbabwe and not just bringing about the end of the rule of law in Zimbabwe," he said in a radio interview from Nepal, where he is ending a weeklong Asian visit. "But it also threatens investment and the standing of stability of the countries around him."

Searching for Congo peace

But before the Zimbabwe issue could be addressed, Mugabe, Chissano, Namibian President Sam Nujoma, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and Rwandan Foreign Minister Andrew Bumaya sat down to discuss Museveni's proposal to end the conflict in the Congo.

Rwandan- and Ugandan-backed rebels have been battling the government troops of President Laurent Kabila, backed by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, for nearly two years. Both sides have repeatedly violated a cease-fire agreement signed last summer.

Zimbabwe's Defense Minister, Moven Mahachi, said after the meeting that the leaders had made "tremendous progress."

"It was a good meeting. We dealt with confidence-building measures amongst ourselves as combatants in the Congo," Mahachi said. "I think that we are now closer to the total implementation of the peace accords signed last year in Zambia. The presidents tackled issues ranging from troop pullout to deployment of the United Nations peacekeepers."

The Ugandan president has proposed that all warring parties withdraw their fighters from the Congo before U.N. peacekeepers are deployed. Madnodje Mounoubai, spokesman for the U.N.'s mission in Congo, said the world body expected to sign an agreement with Kabila next week giving U.N. planes permission to fly anywhere in the former Belgian colony.

The agreement also sets up four areas for U.N. troop deployment.

Kabila led Tutsi rebels in a fight to overthrow Mobuto Sese Seko in 1997, changing the country's name from Zaire. Rwanda and Uganda, countries that backed Kabila in his fight against Mobuto, changed sides to join Hutu rebels who charged Kabila's supporters with human rights abuses against Hutu refugees.

Correspondent Mike Hanna and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Africa News Online
U.S. Department of State, Human Rights Reports for 1999
Zimbabwe Independent Newspaper Online
Zimbabwe Page
Land Issue in Zimbabwe
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Zimbabwe Government Online

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