A Zimbabwean soldier in the British army, who died this week serving in Iraq, has been condemned as a ”mercenary” and a ”sell-out” by President Robert Mugabe’s state media.
The British ministry of defence confirmed this week that Christopher Muzvuru (21) of the Irish Guards had been killed on Sunday in Basra.
He was the first of a small contingent of Zimbabweans serving in the British armed forces to be killed in the Iraq war.
The Daily Mirror, owned by a member of the ruling Zanu(PF) party, urged that authorities here bar Muzvuru’s body from being returned home for burial.
”It should be buried in Britain, the country that he chose to die for,” the newspaper said.
”For a Zimbabwean, whose country is virtually at war with Britain over land redistribution, to join the armed forces of an ‘enemy’ who is literally besieging your country is the highest level of selling out.”
”Buffalo soldier,” read a cartoon of the dead soldier, in a reference to the nickname of an American post-civil war cavalry regiment made up of blacks that was used to fight Indians as settlers swept to occupy the west of the continent.
Muzvuru was among the thousands of young Zimbabweans who fled Zimbabwe in the last three years of lawlessness, violent state repression and economic collapse to find a future in Britain.
The defence ministry said he enlisted in the army in February 2001, and became a member of the Irish Guards’ First Battalion bagpipe band after training as a piper in the Piping School in Edinburgh.
According to Zimbabwean education authorities, between 15 and 20 young Zimbabweans of all races, mostly from the country’s elite private schools, are accepted into the British army each year.
The state-controlled media has portrayed the American and British war on the Iraqi regime as a ”neo-imperialist invasion” aimed solely at seizing the country’s oil assets.
State television has suppressed coverage of the Iraq war, and most Zimbabweans — except for the tiny minority able to afford satellite television — were denied the extraordinary footage of thousands of Iraqis joyously toppling statues and taking off their shoes to beat portraits of their erstwhile leader. – Sapa-DPA