Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has called for bygones to be bygones between black and white in his country, saying the two sides have to live together.
The 82-year-old veteran, scheduled on Thursday to open a road named after him in another Southern African country, Malawi, said late on Wednesday that black and white ”cannot avoid each other”.
Speaking during a four-day state visit to Malawi, Mugabe said: ”We declared a policy of national reconciliation to push off colonialism much further.”
”Many [whites] are left, including the notorious [former Rhodesian prime minister] Ian Smith,” Zimbabwe’s long-time leader said at a banquet in his honour in Malawi’s administrative capital, Lilongwe.
Smith led the former Rhodesia from 1964 until independence from Britain in 1980.
”I wonder how many countries in Europe would be in our situation to have left Ian Smith, despite many Zimbabweans [dying] in the liberation struggle,” Mugabe said in his speech, broadcast on national radio.
”Let bygones be bygones,” said Mugabe, set to open a road named after him leading from the Malawian commercial capital, Blantyre, to the tea-growing area of Malanje in the south-east.
Rights groups in Malawi on Wednesday protested against the naming of the highway after Mugabe, saying he does not deserve the honour because of his poor human rights record at home.
”Based on his poor human rights record at home, we are saying no to Mugabe to be honoured in Malawi with a road. He has caused a lot of misery to the people of Zimbabwe,” said rights coalition spokesperson Rogers Newa.
Newa said his organisation is not against the state visit, but has ”a problem to honour Mugabe by naming a road after him”.
Zimbabwean Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said last month that his country was ready to allow the return of white farmers who were driven off their farms under Mugabe’s land-reform programme.
Made denied, however, that the new openness toward white farmers marked an about-face in land-reform policies that have been widely criticised as a failure, triggering an economic meltdown in what was once the breadbasket of Southern Africa.
Mugabe said the land-reform programme has opened opportunities for many people, including a ”big population of Malawians” living in Zimbabwe.
”We refuse to be recolonised, directly or indirectly,” Mugabe said.
Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika praised Mugabe, calling him a ”true democrat”.
”How can anybody say Mugabe is a sworn enemy of democracy? The first known government of national unity in Africa was initiated by Robert Mugabe in 1980,” Mutharika said. — Sapa-AFP