OWN CORRESPONDENTS, Harare | Thursday
ZIMBABWEAN president Robert Mugabe has lashed out at his country’s courts, the British government and South Africa opposition leader Tony Leon in a belligerent display preceding his ruling ZANU-PF party’s convention.
Mugabe vowed to press ahead with his controversial land seizure plan, attacking the judiciary for trying to protect ”white racist commercial farmers”.
Mugabe, who has defied several court orders to evict liberation war veterans occupying hundreds of white-owned farms since February, accused judges of ignoring the black majority’s right to land.
”They [the judges] will not be allowed to go against our quest for full sovereignty. Our quest to fulfill the wishes of the vast majority of our people in favour of a mere four thousand white racist commercial farmers,” Mugabe said.
”One dimension has to do with the higher courts where some elements, themselves legal spillovers from the UDI era [of white minority rule], have decided to place themselves up against the people, standing as they do between our needful people and their resources,” he said.
His comments came a day after white farmer Henry Elsworth was killed in an ambush near his farm in Kswekwe, 200 km southwest of Harare.
The president also attacked Britain, which he said has attempted to derail his government’s land resettlement program, accusing Britain of backing the year-old opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
Mugabe also said South Africa’s Democratic Alliance ”which comes together under the leadership of Tony Leon clearly shows the intentions of the white communities in our region to reassert themselves as the dominant political force posing a racial challenge to our liberation movements,” The Star reported.
Leon, responding to the attack on him, said: ”I don’t see why I should take him (Mugabe) seriously – nobody else does.”
ZANU-PF officially called the special congress to discuss the party’s flagging fortunes after losing a referendum on a draft constitution in February and only narrowly winning parliamentary polls in June after 20 years in power. – Reuters