HARARE, March 16 AFP - Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who has swatted away international condemnation over assaults on opposition leaders, was once hailed for leading a peaceful and prosperous nation.
The 83-year-old, who is now the oldest leader in Africa, was swept to power in a 1980 election as the liberator of the former British colony of southern Rhodesia and has kept it since.
But after winning a fifth six-year term of office in 2002 in an election which the opposition said was rigged, Mugabe has been ostracised by the West and fellow African leaders are now keeping their distance.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has accused him of presiding over an outpost of tyranny'' while British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the situation unravelling in Zimbabwe truly tragic’’, but Mugabe made clear on Thursday that he did not give a hoot for such critics.
This is the West that has always supported the opposition elsewhere, again showing its true colours. We don't accept their criticism,'' he said. It was characteristic defiance from a man who shows no sign of wishing to retire and revealed his ambitions in a weekend interview to stand for another term next year. Were he to serve the full six years he would be 90. Analysts say his desire to keep office is causing divisions within his Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) that may ultimately prove more dangerous to his survival prospects than the opposition led by Movement of Democratic Change president Morgan Tsvangirai. It was Tsvangirai who suffered defeat at the hands of Mugabe in the March 2002 elections after a violent ballot that international observers found tainted by fraud. Campaigning that year, the former guerrilla leader returned to rhetoric of the 1970s liberation war, calling his re-election bid the third chimurenga’’, or uprising against white rule.
Mugabe tried to paint the MDC as stooges of the white minority who retained ownership of the best farming land after independence, until he embarked on a controversial land reform program in 2000.
Some 4,000 farmers were forced to hand over their land in what he trumpeted as a program to right the injustices of the colonial era.
While landless blacks were meant to be the beneficiaries, some farms ended up in the hands of Mugabe supporters.
The land reform scheme and his crackdowns on opposition members, judges and journalists triggered an uproar and smart sanctions'', including travel bans, against Mugabe and his inner circle by the European Union and the United States. An intellectual who initially embraced Marxism, Mugabe was praised when he won the election that ended white minority rule in 1980, a few weeks after Zimbabwe gained independence. Born on February 21, 1924, at Kutama Mission northwest of the capital Harare, he qualified as a teacher at the age of 17. He took his first political paces when he enrolled at Fort Hare University in South Africa, where he met many of southern Africa's future black nationalist leaders. Mugabe then resumed teaching, moving to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Ghana before returning to what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1960. As a member of various nationalist parties which were banned by the white-minority government, he was detained with other leaders in 1964 and spent the next 10 years in prison camps or jail. He used that period to consolidate his position in the Zimbabwe African National Union and emerged from prison in November 1974 as ZANU leader. He then left for Mozambique, from where his banned party was launching guerrilla attacks on Rhodesia. Economic sanctions and war forced Rhodesian leader Ian Smith to negotiate. After ZANU-PF, which drew most of its support from the Shona majority, swept to power in the 1980 election, Mugabe announced a policy of reconciliation with the country's white minority but most subsequently left. Mugabe also crushed dissent among the minority Ndebele people with his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, which killed an estimated 20,000 suspected dissidents’’.
In his early years Mugabe was widely credited with improving health and education for the black majority. But social services later declined and the AIDS epidemic shattered gains in health care.
Inflation now stands at 1,730 per cent while more than 80 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.