AFP, New York | Sunday
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe said he could have decapitated Ian Smith, the country’s former white prime minister, but that he refrained from doing so because he was not a dictator.
“We have not decapitated him … he still has his land, thank God we are a forgiving people. Now, if I was a dictator, if I was autocratic, I long ago would have demanded the head of Ian Smith,” The Times quoted Mugabe as saying to an audience at a baptist church in Harlem, New York.
“It would be placed on a dish, in a biblical way,” Mugabe, in New York for the UN Millennium summit, said of Smith’s head.
“Nobody recognises that charitable act. I did it on behalf of all Africa,” Mugabe added.
From 1964 to 1979, Smith used rearguard action to maintain white minority rule in the country, declaring unilateral independence from Britain and fighting a guerrilla war against factions of the majority black population.
Zimbabwe became independent in 1980.
Mugabe, who spent 11 years in prison under the white-led Rhodesian regime, has previously expressed regret over not having taken more radical measures against Smith.
In June, in the run-up to general elections in Zimbabwe, Mugabe told a rally outside the capital: “I spent 11 years in prison at the hands of Ian Smith, but he’s still here alive, keeping a head which we should – you know – have taken as our own.”
Meanwhile, Mugabe was defensive about criticism of his government’s controversial land reform programme, which seeks to seize white-owned commercial land – without paying compensation – for resettlement by black peasants.
“We do not have any duty or moral principle on the strength of which we pay compensation. We shall take the land. We will die clinging to our land,” Mugabe said.