Mugabe defends land reforms, blames ‘neocolonialist enemies’ for economic collapse

Mugabe defends land reforms, attacks West

ROME — Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe used the U.N. summit on world hunger Tuesday to lash out at the West and defend land reforms blamed for plunging his people into starvation.

Addressing the summit hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Mugabe said the policy under which thousands of white-owned commercial farms were seized in 2000 was a quest for “equity and justice.”

He blamed the subsequent meltdown of Zimbabwe’s economy on “hostile interventions” by “neocolonialist enemies” that have imposed sanctions on his regime.

Western countries have slapped travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe and his top aides. The ban does not apply to United Nations summits and Mugabe has attended several Food and Agriculture Organization meetings in the last years, always using the podium to attack Western countries that accuse him of undermining democracy.

Mugabe has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980. He was forced into a power-sharing agreement with longtime opposition leader Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai after elections last year that were inconclusive and marred by violence blamed on Mugabe supporters.

Although the coalition government has brought some stability and economic recovery to Zimbabwe, the opposition continues to denounce violence by Mugabe’s allies, while the president’s ZANU-PF party has accused Tsvangirai’s forces of not doing enough to persuade Western nations to lift the sanctions.

Mugabe’s speech at Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters, his take on why 1 billion people worldwide are hungry, was peppered with his habitual rhetoric.

“We face very hostile interventions by these states which have imposed unilateral sanctions on us,” he said. “This has had a negative impact on our farmers, who, according to our neocolonialist enemies, must fail so as to damn the land reforms we have undertaken.”

Mugabe ended his speech with a demand that Western countries “remove their illegal and inhuman sanctions on my country and its people.”