Mugabe warns of ‘imperialist monster’

Michael Hartnack

MUTARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe used his official 82nd birthday celebrations Saturday to launch a new tirade against the West.

In an apparent play on the name of U.S. President George W. Bush, Mugabe warned Zimbabwe’s youth to beware “the monster of imperialism continually and dangerously lurking in the bush.”

He told thousands of schoolchildren gathered in this eastern city that the U.S. leader and British Prime Minister Tony Blair still aimed to exercise mastery through Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

“I am not the master,” he said, sarcastically indicating a small group of invited Western diplomats. “Look at all those people there. They are the masters.”

Mugabe, who has ruled since the country became independent in 1980, delivered a rambling 75 minute speech denouncing whites who rule when the country was named Rhodesia, and urging youth to be ready to take up arms to repel invaders.

He called his “fast track land reform program,” which saw the seizure since February 2000 of 5,000 white owned farms, a success and said “youth should be encouraged to develop an interest in agriculture so they can contribute meaningfully to food production.”

Despite good rains, over 5 million Zimbabweans currently depend on food relief, much of it funded by or imported from the United States. The crash in farm production since 2000 has seen 90 percent of commandeered farmland become derelict.

Raised a strict Catholic, Mugabe used his birthday speech to condemn the emphasis on condoms as a means of checking the HIV/AIDS epidemic which now infects over a fifth of the country’s people.

Choirs sang Mugabe’s praises as he entered the border city’s Sakubva stadium with his 40-year-old wife and three young children. He entered a secret polygamous marriage with her while his late Ghanaian first wife, Sally, was still alive.

Schoolchildren bused in from all parts of the country waved black, yellow, green and red flags of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party to greet him.

On Thursday 61 demonstrators were detained overnight in the capital, Harare, for protesting the planned $2 million expenditure on birthday festivities when many Zimbabweans are starving and homeless.

About 20,000 members of Rhodesia’s once 293,000-strong white community remain. They held 17 percent of the country’s most productive farmland until Mugabe ordered the land seizures.

“Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans, just as Britain is for the British, America for the Americans. So let us not allow outsiders to interfere.”

(Associated Press)