Q&A: Zimbabwe land reform

HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) -- Dozens of white farms have been destroyed and their occupants forced to flee Zimbabwe since its president Robert Mugabe embarked on his land redistribution programme.

CNN's Bob Coen explains why the government is targeting white farms and answers whether Mugabe will be successful.

Q: Why is Mugabe following this policy of land redistribution?

A: Nobody is certain whether it is part of Mugabe's land reform policy. There is a belief that it is being orchestrated by government officials. But people cannot say whether that is the case or whether the land grab is just out of control. There are certainly criminal elements involved as well as ordinary people who are going through economic crisis.

Mobs are taking advantage of the unlawful situation. But the situation can be even more complicated than this because negotiations are going on between white farmers and the government to solve the land issue. Perhaps, there are hardliners trying to sabotage these talks.

Q: How many white farms have been affected?

A: It is hard to say. These latest attacks have happened in the north of the country. About 200 farmers and their families have fled and 100 farms affected by violence.

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Farmers are beginning to assess the damage -- until now it has been very difficult to move around the country to discover the cost.

It certainly amounts to millions of dollars in terms of damage to crops and property.

But you have to differentiate between land reform and what is happening. Certainly more than 90 percent of white farms have been allocated for resettlement. Farmers have offered one million hectares unconditionally as the basis for talks with the government.

Q: Haven't some of these white farmers been toiling the land for four generations?

A: There are some direct descendents of white farmers going back to the last century -- but only a small percentage.

Many are people who bought farms after independence, encouraged by Mugabe in the 1980s to develop farmland. Mostly, they were local whites who decided to take up farming, or return to it, but some came from South Africa.

The so-called war veterans, who have been carrying out much of the recent attacks on white farms, have not necessarily targeted either the direct descendants or the later developers.

At first, they targeted those white farmers with multiple farms, but some of those attacked lately are those with just one farm. The government publishes lists in the newspapers of the names of farms that should be targeted, but sometimes these are not followed by the people on the ground.

Q: How did the first white farmers acquire their land?

A: The first so-called pioneers came with the founder of the country Sir Cecil Rhodes in the late nineteenth-century and from South Africa. Many arrived with a British/South African company to settle, in what was then called Rhodesia.

They were granted tracts of land by the British government under a Royal Charter. The government gave whites a mandate to find gold and settle in the country as part of the imperial scramble for Africa.

Rhodes made deals with some of the local chiefs to handover land for very little -- the chiefs were not fully aware of what was involved in the deals.

The second big wave came after World War II when servicemen were offered the chance to buy land very cheaply in recognition of their service. There was a huge amount of immigration in the 1940s and 1950s -- the biggest influx. A lot left after the bush war that led to independence.

Many of those white farmers facing invasion of their land by war veterans now are being confronted by the same people they faced at the time of the bush war, 25 years ago.

Shortly after the first wave of white settlers arrived the first black uprising occurred. The bush war was the second uprising, and Mugabe argues the current redistribution is the third.

Traditionally the land has been owned by the blacks, but after the white settlers arrived a small amount was split and left with the blacks in areas called native reservations, now called communal lands. This used to be second-rate land, barren or rocky, which has depleted still further over time to become unfertile and has left the blacks struggling.

Q: Are there figures on how much land is owned by the blacks and whites?

A: There are many blacks who do not have access to land, and if they do, it is very small. Zimbabwe has a population of about 13 million blacks and 100,000 whites -- 4,000 of whom are white farmers. The whites own an estimated 70 percent of the land, but that figure is disputed. It is easier to say that they own "much of the land." The whites also still have access to the best land.

Q: Is there a structure to the land reform policy?

A: There have been quite a lot of criticisms that it is not a proper plan. The basic criticism from Britain and other donor countries who support this programme (which is different to land redistribution) is that they want to see a proper plan -- for example, numbers, places, how the government is going to support farmers.

The Zimbabwe government has said that Britain has an obligation to compensate farmers for land. Mugabe says if they will not pay for it the government will take it and give compensation only for improvements to the land, such as buildings.

Under the Lancaster House agreement that ended the bush war, Britain said it would pay compensation. But when UK Prime Minister Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he said "no" to the whole programme, not just land reform, because he said he did not believe there was a plan.

Q: Is land reform an economic or political issue?

A: It is certainly an economic one, but it has been used as a political tool in this critical time for Mugabe who is facing close-run elections next year.

Q: Who are the war veterans?

A: A lot of the self-styled war veterans are too young to have fought in the bush war, but some are the children of war veterans. The war veterans did receive in 1977 a huge pay out after the confrontation.

An important issue is whether the peasants are getting any of the land redistributed. A few weeks' ago, a white farmer killed a black settler who turned out not to be an impoverished black but a manager of a big city company.

Q: How much is colonialism to blame for the current situation?

A: It is too simple to blame colonialism. You cannot escape history and the fact that land was taken from the blacks, but it is a problem that has never been resolved by Mugabe's government after independence. Nothing has been done for the past 20 years.

Q: Can Mugabe be checked?

A: He is determined and believes he is morally justified -- he believes he is a true revolutionary.

He has an unfinished promise he made when fighting the bush war that he would return the land to the blacks.

He wants to do it. Just how convenient it is that it comes at the same time he is fighting for political survival is open to debate.

The outside community can do very little. You have got to remember that its predecessor Rhodesia survived a long time with sanctions in place against it.