Rense.com
Seizure Drive Irreversible
By Cris Chinaka
| HARARE (Reuters) - President
Robert Mugabe vowed on Friday that his drive to seize white-owned farms
for blacks was irreversible, and rejected criticism that he had pushed
Zimbabwe into lawlessness by allowing his supporters to invade the land. In a fiery speech at the burial of controversial war veterans' leader Chenjerai Hunzvi, who led the invasion of hundreds of farms last year, Mugabe accused former colonial power Britain of ignoring the history of how blacks lost their land to whites. Mugabe said black Zimbabweans opposed to his land seizure program were either cowards or traitors because they had failed to understand it was part of the liberation struggle. ``We are committed to this program. We will not retreat,'' he told about 20,000 mourners at Hunzvi's funeral. ``There can be no greater tribute to him (Hunzvi) than that which ensures that the fast-track land resettlement program is intensified and the campaign is sustained to the finish.'' Mugabe, 77, and in power since the former Rhodesia won independence in 1980, said thousands of people, led by ruling party militants, who have occupied white farms had simply broken the law of trespass. ``The British government today would want to tell the world that the rule of law doesn't exist merely because there is an occupation of the land,'' he said, repeating that he would never use the army or police to evict the squatters. ``Perhaps (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair was too young, if ever he was born at all, to appreciate what his predecessors did (in dispossessing blacks). ``He should learn a bit of our history at least now that the British people have returned him to power, he has ample time to study the history of colonialism,'' Mugabe said. Mugabe -- who attacks Britain in almost all his public speeches on the land issue or Zimbabwe's growing economic crisis -- said Friday his government ridiculed laws supporting the status quo. ``Law-abiding Africans are those who will not challenge the immorality and illegality of their depreviation but will happily retreat to their arid patch of land,'' he said. Mugabe says 4,500 white farmers own 70 percent of the country's best farmland while majority blacks are crowded in unfertile districts. Hunzvi, who died Monday aged 51 and was declared a national hero by the ruling ZANU-PF party, was a key political ally of Mugabe seen playing a central role in his re-election campaign ahead of presidential elections due next year. Thousands of ex-combatants and self-styled veterans, some too young to have fought in the 1970s independence war, marched to ZANU-PF offices Thursday in tribute to Hunzvi. In 1997 Hunzvi led the war veterans in protests which forced Mugabe's government to pay them huge payouts for their role in the liberation war. Hunzvi, a flamboyant character who delighted in his former guerrilla name ``Hitler,'' spearheaded a violent campaign against the opposition that helped ZANU-PF narrowly win parliamentary elections last year. At least 31 people, mostly MDC supporters, including five white farmers, died in months of political violence. The government says Hunzvi died of kidney failure linked to cerebral malaria and Mugabe has dismissed as malicious rumors suggesting the veterans leader had AIDS. Hunzvi was divorced from his Polish wife Wieslawa whom he met while studying medicine in Warsaw in the 1980s. Wieslawa returned to Poland with the couple's two children after the divorce. |
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