HARARE, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal's ruling that 78 white former commercial farmers whose properties were compulsorily acquired by the Zimbabwean government for resettlement could keep their farms will not reverse land reforms, a Zimbabwean official has said.

    Responding to the ruling made last Friday, Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, Didymus Mutasa, said the government would disregard the judgment.

    According to reports by The Herald on Monday, Mutasa emphasized that the government would accelerate the land reform program instead. He said remaining white-owned farms would be acquired by the government for the benefits of those left out of the program since 2000.

    On Friday, the SADC Tribunal ruled that 78 white farmers could keep their farms because the land reform program discriminated against them. President of the tribunal Judge Luis Mondlane said the Zimbabwean government had violated the treaty governing the 15-nation regional bloc by compulsorily acquiring white-owned farms for resettlement.

    Mutasa dismissed the call to protect the farmers, saying the government would treat white farmers equally as everyone else. "There is nothing special about the 75 farmers and we will take more farms. It's not discrimination against farmers but correcting land imbalances," he said.

    The verdict was the first major ruling by the SADC Tribunal since it first convened in April last year. The group of white farmers was led by William Michael Campbell, who filed the case last December.

    But a lawyer representing resettled farmers, Farai Mutamangira, described the ruling by the regional court as shocking because it ignored the history of the land issue in Zimbabwe.