The Zimbabwe government is moving to restore some confiscated farms to white farmers, to compensate evicted farmers for improvements to their farms and to amend draconian security and media laws, the South African government said on Friday.
Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said there had also been "movement" by the Zimbabwe government on fulfilling two other key undertakings it had given to the South African government recently.
The Zimbabwe government had reported its progress on meeting these undertakings at a meeting of SADC foreign ministers which Dlamini-Zuma attended in Harare last week.
It is understood that the SADC ministers severely reprimanded Zimbabwe for a recent spate of reported human rights abuses in response to an opposition-led stayaway. The ministers reportedly told their Zimbabwean counterpart that though SADC members had defended its land reforms, human rights abuses were "indefensible".
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Dlamini-Zuma would not comment on these reports but did confirm that human rights had been discussed.
On the six undertakings, she said the Zimbabwe government told SADC it had set aside about R450-million so far to compensate evicted farmers for improvements they had made to their farms.
"Work was still going on" to do that, she said and South Africa's High Commission in Harare was helping the South African farmers in Zimbabwe who had been left with nowhere to farm.
And the Zimbabwe government had submitted legislation to parliament to amend the draconian Smith-era Public Order and Security Act and the recently-enacted media law which imposed heavy restrictions on journalists.
Harare had also moved to address the plight of the many foreign-born farmworkers who had been evicted from farms seized from white farmers for re-distribution. They had nowhere to go and no rights in Zimbabwe.
Now the government had introduced legislation to say that all those resident in Zimbabwe at the time of independence in 1980 could become Zimbabwe citizens.
And on the sixth undertaking, to address the economic crisis, she said the Zimbabwe government had told them that government, labour and business had agreed on "some kind of plan" to tackle the economic problems.
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