Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Sunday left on a four-day state visit to Iran to beef up trade and political ties with a fellow pariah nation in Western eyes, state radio reported.
”Zimbabwe and Iran share a lot in common … and the leaders of the two countries have stood their ground against Western attempts to vilify their respective governments for their principled stance on sovereignty,” it said.
”The visit will see the two countries strengthening ties on energy, telecommunications, transport and trade,” it said, without elaborating.
Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami visited Harare in January last year. He said the once-model economy, now in tatters, could play a ”pivotal” role in uplifting Africa, the world’s poorest continent.
Iran is one of the countries Mugabe has been warming to as part of the ”Look East” policy, partly forced by Zimbabwe’s isolation from the West over controversial land reforms and allegedly fraud-marred elections in 2000 and 2002.
Zimbabwe and Iran have a common enemy in United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has branded Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and Zimbabwe as ”outposts of tyranny”.
Mugabe has blasted Rice as ”that girl born out of the slave ancestry, who should know from the history of slavery in America, from the present situation of blacks in America, that the white man is not a friend”.
”The white man is the slave master to her,” said Mugabe, claiming that Rice echoed ”her master’s voice”.
The United States’s frosty relations with Iran have worsened over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Washington claims the Islamic republic’s uranium enrichment programme is ultimately aimed at producing fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Iran meanwhile insists it will use the enriched uranium only to fuel nuclear power stations, something it is permitted to do as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. – Sapa-AFP