Farmers launch new bid for compensation

Zimbabwean farmers who lost their land in the past 17 years are launching a new legal challenge in a bid for compensation, Beeld reports. The Mike Campbell Foundation in Zimbabwe said they issued notices to President Robert Mugabe and three of his Ministers that they will be invoking the SADC protocol on finances and investments that makes provision for an international arbitration process for SADC role-players if dialogue fails. The now disbanded SADC Tribunal held in 2008 that the Zimbabwean Government must compensate farmers who lost their land due to arbitrary and racist land grabs. The finances protocol has been invoked only once. This was when South African mining company Swissborough demanded arbitration over mining rights in Lesotho.