/ 17 June 2011

Zim is ‘ready’ to bury hatchet with UK

Zim Is 'ready' To Bury Hatchet With Uk

Robert Mugabe’s chief spin doctor has signalled that Zimbabwe is ready to bury decades of hostility towards Britain because of the election of David Cameron as prime minister just over a year ago.

Jonathan Moyo, a senior MP in Mugabes Zanu-PF party, credited the British prime minister with reducing tension between Zimbabwe and its former colonial master. “The fact of the matter is, sooner or later Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom should engage each other,” Moyo said during a visit to South Africa.

“There are many reasons [why this] should be possible.”

Once knighted by the queen, Mugabe has reserved his most embittered rhetoric for Britain, accusing it of neo-colonial meddling, which he blames for the country’s ills more than 30 years after independence.

But Moyo said last year’s general election result in the UK created space for a shift in relations. “We can all see that Cameron is not as loquacious as [Gordon] Brown or, worse, Tony Blair. Definitely not. He’s kept his views on Zimbabwe to himself. He’s not even as loquacious as [William] Hague, who sometimes gets carried away because of what he imagines is the success he’s having in Libya …

“But, by and large, they are behaving as the Conservatives we historically have known. It is a historical fact that the independence process was in colonial terms made possible by the Conservatives.”

Moyo did criticise Cameron for being a “cheerleader” in the military intervention in Libya, but said: “Re Zimbabwe, I think an objective assessment would be that he has managed to lower the levels of noise, which in turn has contributed to lowering levels of tension.

We don’t make as much noise ourselves against the UK as we did because we think that there’s an opportunity that was squandered by Brown and Blair. Also, I think it is safe to say there have been attempts by both sides to reach out and … there have even been attempts to solve things on the cricket front, which would be one useful entry point.”

He used a colourful image to suggest Britain might now be willing to shift from its former position. “I think the British problem is that they behaved like a drunkard who climbed a tree overnight only to wake up in the morning naked and unable to come down and so conjures up all sorts of stories to justify why they are there and it takes time to get down,” Moyo said. “We are prepared to give them a ladder. What we don’t know is will they want to use it at night or during the day.”

Moyo is a former information minister and the architect of Zimbabwe’s harsh media laws. He fell out with Zanu-PF in 2004 and became an outspoken critic of Mugabe, only to return to the fold in 2009. — Guardian News & Media 2011