Harare – Zimbabwe will always regard former colonial ruler Britain as an enemy, President Robert Mugabe said on Friday in a speech that also took a swipe at a leading clergyman who has been an outspoken critic of his government.

Mugabe has clashed with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair mainly over his seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks he says were dispossessed of their land during white colonial rule.

Speaking at the state funeral of war veteran Mark Dube on Friday, Mugabe singled out outspoken Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo as being among opponents he said were aligned with Britain in working to topple his administration.

‘It is very easy to throw a nation into strife’
Dube was a former provincial governor who served as a senior military trainer for Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party during Zimbabwe’s long liberation war.

“Dube would never have gone to Britain to invite Blair to please come and invade his motherland, in the same satanic way Archbishop Pius Ncube and his opposition colleagues are doing repeatedly today,” Mugabe said.

“He would never speak the language of tribalism, that destructive dialect we again hear from the pulpit.”

Ncube has called for tough regional and international action against Mugabe, who he says has subjected Zimbabweans to political repression and economic hardship since coming to power at independence in 1980.

Ncube has also been vocal against a 1980s government crackdown on dissidents from Zimbabwe’s minority Ndebele ethnic group, which rights groups say killed more than 20 000 civilians.

‘They remain colonial enemies’
“It is very easy to throw a nation into strife, to trigger an unhappy fate through unmeasured language meant to inflame, incite and instigate. Is that the fate we wish for our country?” Mugabe said in apparent reference to Ncube.

“Let’s take care forever that we do not place this country in the hands of those who are ready to sup and dine with the enemy, those who are ready to rush to the enemy and call him a friend, forgetting that yesterday he was the cause of the bloodshed of this country.

“That enemy was Britain and Britain and its allies. They can never, ever be our friends indeed and whatever they do, however they think, they remain colonial enemies.”

Mugabe denies mismanaging Zimbabwe over the last 25 years, leading to record unemployment, inflation and erratic supplies of food and foreign currency. He charges the economy has been undermined by his local and foreign opponents as punishment for his controversial land reforms.

Source: Independent Online (IOL)
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>