Tsvangirai will never rule "as long as I live": Mugabe

[Jahness]

Tsvangirai will never rule "as long as I live": Mugabe

by Fanuel Jongwe


Long-ruling Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe denounced opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as a stooge of the West on Friday in the face of mounting international condemnation of his rule.

Tsvangirai would never rule the country as long as he was alive, said 83-year-old Mugabe, shrugging off criticism over his government's recent violent crackdown on the opposition which saw Tsvangirai, among others, detained and assaulted.

"Tsvangirai, you want to rule this country on behalf of (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair," Mugabe told hundreds of supporters at his party headquarters.

"As long as I am alive that will never happen."

He charged Britain with using Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as a front to re-colonise Zimbabwe in order to plunder the country's minerals.

"You (Tsvangirai) thought when I say I am 83, you could push me. It's a solid 83 years of experience and resilience and I know the tactics.

"We went to jail, we are hardened. Nothing frightens me. Someone wrote that I am a frightened man. Frightened by who? Little men like Blair? I have seen it all. I make a stand on principle, here I was born, here I stand and here I shall die."

Neighbouring South Africa, warning that a "total meltdown" was facing Zimbabwe, also lashed out at foreign countries that question its policy of quiet diplomacy towards Harare.

"If outside governments played a more constructive role from the outset we would not have had this crisis in Zimbabwe," deputy foreign affairs minister Aziz Pahad told reporters in Pretoria.

South Africa and the Southern African Development Community "remained seized with the matter", Pahad said, but did not elaborate.

The United States and Britain have threatened to broaden sanctions against Mugabe and his inner circle, but Mugabe has told them to "go hang".

Australia added its voice to the protest on Friday, calling on South Africa to pressure Mugabe into quitting.

"We pussyfoot around far too much using diplomatic language," Prime Minister John Howard told commercial radio. "This man is a disaster, his country is just a total heap of misery.

Mugabe's anti-Western sentiments were echoed in an unlikely quarter when Arthur Mutambara, who leads a faction of the MDC, said only Africans had the moral authority to speak out against the situation in his country.

"The only people who have a legitimate role to talk about Zimbabwe are Africans ... Mugabe is a despot, a dictator, brutalising blacks, brutalising whites, brutalising Africans," the SAPA news agency quoted Mutambara as telling a seminar on Zimbabwe in Johannesburg.

But Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, urged members of his ruling ZANU-PF to stand up against their opponents saying there was no room in the party for cowards.

Traditionally loathe to interfere in Zimbabwean affairs, African leaders have started adding their voices to the growing international discontent over the country's political and economic downspiral.

Zimbabwe is facing inflation in excess of 1,700 percent, 80 percent unemployment and shortages of consumer goods and fuel.

Meanwhile, MDC youth members vowed on Friday to stand up against Mugabe's rule, announcing plans to continue holding rallies banned by the government.

And authorities said a police station in the eastern border town of Mutare in Zimbabwe has been petrol bombed, allegedly by MDC youths.

Nobody was injured in the attack which occurred around 0100 GMT.

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Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse.