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Zimbabwe

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) on his debate. Today, I have spoken to members of Tendai Biti's family, both here and in Zimbabwe, and he is recovering. He has met many of the Members here, including the members of the all-party group on Zimbabwe, and he will be very grateful and pleased that we are sending him our best wishes. Land is an emotive issue in Zimbabwe; having travelled hundreds of miles through Zimbabwe over the past 10 years, and coming as I do from a farming background, I feel pretty emotional about it myself. My emotion arises, first, from seeing thousands and thousands of acres of good agricultural land revert to scrubland. It also arises from seeing thousands and thousands of skilled agricultural workers consigned to enforced idleness, joblessness and the prospect of having no future. It is outrageous that that should be happening in a world short of food and on a continent where hunger is never far away. What makes me very angry indeed, however, is the thought that my constituents just down the road in Lambeth, Vauxhall and Brixton are paying their taxes so that food can be shipped halfway around the world to feed people in a country that, until very recently, exported food. Indeed, it could still be exporting food but for the disastrous actions of Mugabe and his ruling clique, which has sacrificed the prosperity and well-being of an entire nation to their greed for power and plunder. It is really important to set the discussion of land in Zimbabwe in that context, because there is a tendency among many people and many of the relief agencies to tiptoe around the real issues. Some people still often blame the food shortages on bad harvests and bad weather, when the truth is that the chaotic fast-track land reform process has resulted in whole swathes of land being taken out of production. Earlier this month, the Red Cross announced that more than 2 million Zimbabweans are urgently in need of food assistance, before going on to blame the shortages on drought in some areas and excessive rain in others. That statement shows a real drought of honesty over the real reasons why Zimbabweans are hungry. While ZANU Ministers and the people at the top of the armed forces sit in the farm houses that they have grabbed, the land lies uncultivated and unproductive, and those who should be working it are displaced and destitute. That is shocking and scandalous. Whatever the weasel words from Mugabe and his apologists about righting the supposed wrongs of colonialism, the people of Zimbabwe are now far worse off than they were in the 1980s. It would be helpful if the Minister could assure us that DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will do all they can to make sure that NGOs delivering programmes funded by British taxpayers become in no way complicit in promoting the politicised misrepresentation of facts favoured by ZANU-PF. I realise that it is sometimes difficult and that organisations do not want to jeopardise their operations in the country by becoming overtly political, but if we are providing their funding, it is important they should not, for the sake of a quiet life, play along with sometimes distorted versions of events that denigrate the UK and gloss over the appalling record of Mugabe's Government. Recently, the general secretary of the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe, Gertrude Hambira, came to speak to the all-party group on Zimbabwe about a report and a film produced by the union, which show the human rights violations suffered by farm workers as a result of the land reform process. She was in hiding until very recently because armed men forced their way into her home to abduct her. Only last month, the Central Intelligence Organisation—Zimbabwe's secret police, who are still operating in Zimbabwe despite the global political agreement—raided the union's offices looking for Gertrude, and she had to flee to South Africa for safety. Such things are still happening day in, day out to trade union leaders who tell the truth about land reform in Zimbabwe and who try to defend the rights of workers.