(TALKZIMBABWE) Mugabe slams ‘racist Boers’ with colonial nostalgia

Mugabe slams ‘racist Boers’ with colonial nostalgia
This article was written by Our reporter on 9 June, at 18 : 51

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe said on Friday that South Africa’s ruling African National Congress should block an investigation in South Africa into alleged violence by Zanu-PF because it is inspired by racist whites. He made the remarks while officially opening a summit of former Sadc liberation movements in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.

“Naturally, as we develop and enact policies to deliver on these promises to our people such as our land reform programmes and the ongoing indigenisation and empowerment programmes here in Zimbabwe, we are targets for regime change.

“In this context, it is important to remember that this Harare meeting takes place after the recent ruling by one Boer Judge Hans Fabricius in the North Gauteng High Court in South Africa calling on authorities in that country to probe alleged atrocities in Zimbabwe, arrest and prosecute alleged offenders under the International Criminal Court of which South Africa is a party and Zimbabwe is not.

“Needless to say, we take umbrage at these residual Rhodesian and Apartheid forces that are finding space in our midst, to use our courts in a manner that seeks to mollify their defeat at the hands of our liberation struggles and reverse the gains that we have attained for our collective peoples.

“That judgment, like those outrageous ones of the Sadc Tribunal which has now been dissolved, constitutes a direct assault on our sovereignty by shameless forces afflicted by racist nostalgia.”

He urged the ANC to take action.

“I wish to urge our colleagues in the ANC of South Africa to see this for what it is and apply every means at their disposal to ensure that such machinations are not in the end, allowed to negatively affect our cordial relations.”

The President urged delegates to the summit to digest the issue and “pronounce itself clearly against that judgment as one of its resolutions”.

In May, a South African judge ordered prosecutors in that country to investigate alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

The case was filed by a human rights group called the Zimbabwean Exiles Forum.

The President urged South African leaders to “apply every means at their disposal” to prevent the case souring relations between the two countries that fought a common struggle to end white minority rule in Africa.

The ruling came at the instigation of those “still in our midst yearning for the old flags” of Rhodesia, he said.

He told representatives of the liberation groups of the ANC, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe that Africa has come under renewed attack from former colonisers determined to replace revolutionary parties with “malleable stooges.”

He said it is the role of liberation movement summits to ensure liberation struggle gains are not reversed.

“We want resolute and focused implementation of resolutions with tangible results, that has been our hallmark of the struggle, please make it remain so.

“Lest we forget, the purpose of these meetings is to accord former liberation movements an opportunity to deliberate, agree and develop joint strategies to enable us to retain the power we won on behalf of the people.

“This is urgent given that our revolutionary ideologies have come under sustained attack, nay, renewed attack from our erstwhile colonial masters who are determined to replace our revolutionary parties with malleable, neo-liberal stooge parties deliberately formed, built and funded to reverse all the gains of our liberation struggles,” President Mugabe said.

He narrated how the West formed the MDC in 1999 in a bid to reverse the gains of the liberation struggle and went on to locate the hands of the imperialists in uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Ivory Coast and Libya.

“Now being checked in Syria and contained in Iran, this predatory advancing wave of Western liberal imperialism is searching most desperately for other avenues of least resistance in which to express itself.

“We do not have to look far to see the West’s dark hand behind the current disturbances in Mali and Guinea Bissau. See how the carnal forces now seek the imminent balkanisation of Mali into smaller states and similar fragmentation of Libya into three or more separate states.

“As liberation movements, we need to closely watch these and other unfolding situations in the Horn of Africa, in order to be fully alerted to the key role players of

Africa’s destabilisation, establish their intentions and conceive ways and means of resisting the savagery of their actions. Africa should never be a colony again!” President Mugabe said.

He said Southern Africa, having been the last frontier of colonialism and by virtue of its high concentration of liberation movements in national politics, was regarded as inimical to the West’s fundamental interests.

The Zanu-PF party is not going to lose power without fighting to defend its role in achieving independence, President Mugabe said.

President Mugabe acknowledged on Friday that his Zanu-PF party lost votes in strongholds in the 2008 polls, but the party could still rule permanently with its traditional support.

“Parties don’t retire, its persons who retire. We cannot say we have stayed too long in government so that we should give others a chance to rule,” he said.