Harare | Sunday
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has shrugged off international criticism ahead of elections in March, unleashing a new broadside against British Prime Minister Tony Blair and saying God was on Zimbabwe’s side.
”Mr Blair, don’t be a liar, a Bliar,” Mugabe told a meeting of over 5 000 Christians in the capital Harare.
”God is on our side.”
The veteran Zimbabwean leader accused Blair of lying about the situation in the country, where opposition leaders are complaining of violence at the hands of state forces.
”My government has been clear in its condemnation of violence,” Mugabe said, in a report carried by the state news agency Ziana.
”People should live in peace. We should not fight each other but contest in the ballot,” he said.
”God gave each one of us land and wealth,” Mugabe said. ”He gave us Zimbabwe and no aliens should come and dislodge what is rightfully ours.”
Mugabe has come under heavy fire in the past week after the passage of tough new electoral and security laws seen as effectively preventing foreign observers from monitoring the election, and banning foreign journalists from the country.
The measures prompted the European Union to insist on two ”immediate actions” ”the invitation and accreditation of international election observers, including from the EU,” and ”full access to national and international media.”
It said its foreign ministers would review the situation at their next meeting in Brussels on January 28-29.
In an apparent concession the Zimbabwean government hinted that it could allow EU observers to oversee the polling, although the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Saturday that it was sceptical.
The election is due to take place on March 9 and 10, and the MDC is expected to mount the strongest challenge yet to Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party.
Britain, the former colonial power, said the presidential election will not be free and fair, and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has vowed that London will push for Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth if political unrest worsens.
Britain agreed last year to support land reform in Zimbabwe in return for a commitment from the government to end invasions of white-owned farms and put a stop to political violence that has wracked the country for close to two years.
In South Africa meanwhile, former archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Mugabe, once respected as a statesman, was placing his country on the ”slippery slope of perdition.”
In neighbouring South Africa meanwhile, former archbishop Desmond Tutu said Mugabe had degenerated from being one of the best leaders on the African continent into a madman.
”It is a great sadness, what has happened to President Mugabe.
He was one of Africa’s best leaders, a bright spark, a debonair, well-spoken and well-read person,” Tutu said in an interview in the Star newspaper in Johannesburg.
”When one looks at what has happened in Zimbabwe, it seems (like) a bad plot of a very melodramatic and poorly constructed novel… Mugabe seems to have gone bonkers in a big way,” said Tutu, who won the Nobel peace prize for his campaign against the former apartheid regime in his country. – Sapa-AFP