Johannesburg | Monday
THE Zimbabwe government on Sunday said a story in the British Sunday Telegraph alleging that President Robert Mugabe had hatched a plan to expel white farmers from the country before next year’s presidential polls amounted to “idiocy”.
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said he preferred not to comment on such “idiocy” because doing so would give it “a semblance of rationality”.
“It is out of the realm of rationality,” he said when asked about the report.
“It’s the same thing as the ghost story,” Moyo said in reference to another British paper, the Sunday Times, which reported two weeks ago that Mugabe was being haunted by the ghost of a liberation war military commander.
The Sunday Telegraph said a secret document from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to pro-government war veterans outlined the political goals of a campaign being waged against white farmers.
Entitled “Operation Give up and Leave”, the British broadsheet said the document read: “The operation should be thoroughly planned so that farmers are systematically harassed and mentally tortured and their farms destabilised until they give in and give up.”
Mugabe has embarked on land reforms aimed at redressing colonial inequities which left 70% of prime agricultural land in the hands of relatively few white farmers.
‘We didn’t cry when apartheid affected us here in a big way. We said ‘fight justly’ In the meantime, Mugabe said he would not let up on land reforms because of concern it is hurting South Africa.
In an interview earlier this month with the Nigerian newspaper The Guardian, but only published in full on Sunday, Mugabe said the white minority in South Africa was fearful of his campaign.
“In South Africa… the whites there are afraid of what might happen here, if we succeed in empowering our people. If we succeed here they fear that the same might happen in South Africa,” he said.
South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is reported to have led a behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade his Zimbabwean counterpart to end the violence, but this has been rejected.
“We are not going to stand by merely because what we do here affects South Africa. We have our own interests, the interests of our people to serve,” Mugabe said.
“Potentially a conflict situation exists in South Africa. We didn’t cry when apartheid affected us here in a big way. We said ‘fight justly’,” he added. – AFP