A 39-YEAR-OLD Zimbabwean woman who admitted a part in farm invasions has been denied asylum in the United Kingdom after a judge accused her of “crimes against humanity”.
Justice Ouseley threw out the widowed mother-of-two’s appeal to remain in the UK after she confessed to beating up ten people during two invasions of white-owned commercial farms.
The judge said the state-sanctioned mob violence, which the Zimbabwe government said was aimed at correcting skewed land ownership patterns, was akin to genocide.
“We are satisfied that the two farm invasions were crimes against humanity,” the judge said, likening the woman’s role to a concentration camp guard who followed Nazi orders during the Holocaust.
The woman, who cannot be named, came to Britain illegally in 2002 and did not claim asylum until six years later.
Her bid for refugee status was rejected on the grounds that her own violent actions in Zimbabwe disqualified her from humanitarian protection in Britain.
She admitted to being part of a gang of thugs from President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party who invaded two white-owned farms intent on causing maximum terror and driving away black workers.
The woman, referred to only as ‘SK”, agreed she had beaten up to ten people whilst their homes burned, “inflicting enough pain to get them to run away”.
She said that on one occasion, she beat a woman so badly she thought she would die.
However, she insisted she had taken part in the raids under duress to prove her loyalty to Zanu PF and she had never intended to kill anyone.
Justice Ouseley, sitting at the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, said the farm invasions were “part of widespread, systematic attacks” against white farmers and their black workers, carried out with the full knowledge of Mugabe’s government “as a deliberate act of policy”.
The intention behind the “obviously inhumane” invasions “was to cause great suffering or inflict serious physical or mental injury” on victims and cow them into never returning to their homes or opposing Zanu PF, he added.
The Tribunal accepted that the woman was a “lesser participant” in the bloodshed and others were even more brutal.
However, she took “a voluntary, even if reluctant” part.
Zimbabwe had 4,500 white commercial farmers before 1970s liberation war veterans marched on the farms, angry at the slow pace of land redistribution. Twelve commercial farmers died and dozens others were severely injured in attacks that followed.
(reporting Daily Mail)