Robert Mugabe defends land grabs

Pakistan News.Net
Friday 25th September, 2009

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has defended his government’s confiscation of farmlands owned by whites.

“It was the best thing that could have ever have happened to an African country,” he told CNN during an interview on Thursday night.

Mugabe, 85, is in the United States for the UN General Assembly.

The Zimbabwean government has evicted thousands of white farmers from their land in recent years under what it terms its land reform program. This is despite the fact that the majority of white farmers that lost their land had been born in Zimbabwe.

"Zimbabwe belongs to the Zimbabweans, pure and simple," a defiant Mugabe told CNN. "They occupied the land illegally. They seized the land from our people," he said. Pointed out that most of the land owners evicted were born in Zimbabwe, the African leader said those farmers were descendents from Britain and British settlers had taken land from Zimbabweans during the Colonial era.

President Mugabe also took issue with South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has referred to Mugabe as the caricature of an African dictator.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about, the little man," Mugabe told the CNN interviewer.

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