The West only discovers property rights when the landowners are white

Zimbabwe will return 67 farms seized during the land reform programme to European nationals from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The Agriculture Minister said the farms were protected by bilateral investment protection agreements signed before the seizures. The move supports President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s efforts to rebuild relations with Western governments and international financial institutions after crisis, sanctions, isolation and debt default. Zimbabwe is restructuring about $11.7bn in external debt, and the IMF approved a staff-monitored programme to support reforms and debt restructuring. Resolving land reform disputes is central to re-engagement. Zimbabwe signed a $3.5bn compensation agreement in 2020 and began compensating treaty-protected foreign farmers, while colonial dispossession that created white land ownership remains largely outside the same legal and moral framework.

"This development also exposes a deeper contradiction embedded in the global order governing land and property rights in former settler colonies: European claims arising from postcolonial redistribution are treated as urgent, enforceable and respectable, while African claims arising from colonial dispossession remain largely outside the same legal and moral framework. The colonial dispossession that created white land ownership in Rhodesia never received the same urgency as the one now directed at restoring European cla"

Read at www.aljazeera.com