Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has said he is determined to attend a Europe-Africa summit in Lisbon next month despite pressure from Britain that he be kept off the invitation list.
”Portugal said they would invite me,” Mugabe said in an interview published by state media in Angola on Friday.
While he had yet to receive an approach from the Portuguese, Mugabe said: ”I will go if I get the invitation.”
The build-up to December’s summit in the Portuguese capital has been overshadowed by the row over the possible attendance of Mugabe, who is currently subject to a European Union travel ban.
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler Britain, has vowed to stay away from the summit if Mugabe attends the meeting.
Governments belonging to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc, which is currently trying to mediate between Zimbabwe’s feuding government and opposition ahead of elections next year, have also threatened to miss the summit if Mugabe is not allowed to attend.
Mugabe thanked SADC for its stance, adding that ”Europe should not choose who of us should come and who should not”.
Were that to happen ”then we are a finished people”, added Mugabe, who has ruled the Southern African nation since independence in 1980.
Europeans ”have lots of sins themselves and many things we don’t like they are doing” but ”we will not say that if so-and-so comes to the United Nations we will not go”, he added.
Mugabe’s relations with his former allies in the West plummeted when he embarked on a controversial programme of land reforms which saw thousands of white-owned farms expropriated by the Zimbabwean government.
While the beneficiaries were meant to be landless black Zimbabweans, many of the farms ended up in the hands of ruling Zanu-PF members.
A series of targeted sanctions, including the travel ban on Mugabe and his close associates, was imposed by the EU and United States in the aftermath of elections in 2002, which he is alleged to have rigged.
Mugabe said he was not at odds with Europe as a whole but merely Britain, which he says has reneged on an agreement to fund land redistribution.
”Our problem is purely bilateral, between Britain and Zimbabwe, and that has to do with land,” said Mugabe.
March
Meanwhile, thousands of supporters of Mugabe gathered at his party’s headquarters in Harare on Friday in what may have been a failed attempt to stage a million-man march, reports said.
War veterans said earlier this month they were planning to hold a million-man march in support of the veteran leader, who plans to stand for a fourth term in office in elections next year.
Although no date for the march was publicly announced, reports on independent Zimbabwe news websites suggested it had been set for Friday.
In a late-night news bulletin, official state television said the number of people gathered for Friday’s march by far outnumbered those who had gathered for previous demonstrations in solidarity with the 83-year-old president.
The sheer number of people who turned up forced organisers to abandon the plan to march through the central business district because it would have disrupted traffic and brought business to a standstill, the report said.
Footage of the gathering showed crowds, but nowhere near a million people. — Sapa-AFP, dpa