Harare | Monday
ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe said on Monday his land reform efforts have been distorted by “extraneous political issues”, such as democracy, the rule of law, press freedom and judicial independence.
Mugabe said his government had “a clear conscience” in going ahead with the violence-wracked program to resettle poor blacks on white-owned lands, despite what he called “hostile western media coverage of this country.”
“The land issue has now been extensively distorted by the deliberate introduction of extraneous political issues, such as the questions of governance, democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, the judiciary, and so on,” Mugabe said at the opening of a regional defence ministerial meeting.
He said those issues were “concepts that were in any case alien to the Rhodesian regimes until we introduced them ourselves in an independent Zimbabwe through our revolutionary struggle.”
Criticism of his land reform scheme, he said, had a racial motivation, “since the world is being deceived into believing that a villainous black government is victimizing the white people in Zimbabwe.”
“We cannot allow such deceit to succeed in destroying our efforts to correct this colossal colonial injustice that has caused untold poverty and suffering among our people,” Mugabe said.
Since February 2000, Mugabe’s efforts to redress colonial-era inequalities in land ownership have been accompanied by the violent occupations of white farms by self-styled veterans of the 1970s liberation war to end white-minority rule.
Mugabe has publicly backed the war vets’ campaign, which has been closely tied to political violence that left at least 34 people dead before parliamentary elections almost one year ago.
Thousands more have suffered beatings, rapes or other intimidation.
The government says it has resettled 105_000 families on three million hectares of land since July last year. – AFP