| Abstrakt: |
This paper unpacks the land reclamation exercise in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s to early 2000s led by the war veterans of the 2nd Chimurenga together with the general landless populace and the government of Zimbabwe. The exercise followed the reneging of the Lancaster House Agreement by the Tony Blair administration where Britain committed to fund equitable land redistribution in Zimbabwe after independence in 1980. Irked by the abandoning of the promise to fully fund the land redistribution by the British authorities led by Blair, the Government of Zimbabwe under the late Robert Gabriel Mugabe proceeded to take back its land from mostly a minority white farmers who held a lion's share of all the productive land to redistribute it to mostly landless black Zimbabweans who were the original and rightful owners of the land. The exercise triggered a ruthless backlash from the United States of America (US), the European Union (EU) and the British who immediately connived to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe in an effort to force and coerce the government to abandon its program because it affected white commercial farmers and their organizations. The paper discusses three entities including Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe (IDBZ), AgriBank and Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (ZISCO) that were sanctioned by the US, EU and Britain to arm-twist Zimbabwe to relinquish the land redistribution exercise. The aim of the paper is to expose the US, EU and British hypocrisy of claiming that sanctions are targeted whilst they are intended to stunt Zimbabwe's social, political, and economic growth as punishment for repossessing its land from the former colonialists. The paper adopts Desk Top research as its methodology, which includes searching through secondary data without fieldwork. Findings that emerge from the research show that the sanctions are wholesale contrary to assertions by mostly the US, EU and Britain, and are meant to destroy the economy thereby causing suffering to ordinary citizens such as women and children among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
