'We Are Being Bought Like Sheep': Mugabe Launches Vitriolic Attack on Uk and Opposition

Robert Mugabe accused Britain of bribing his political opponents to recolonize Zimbabwe in an uncompromising and, at times, bitter speech to mark his country's 28th anniversary of independence yesterday.

Mugabe's long and vitriolic denunciations bore the hallmark of a campaign appeal as Zimbabweans await the results of recounts today in 23 constituencies, and a final declaration of the presidential election held three weeks ago. The ruling Zanu-PF party has said it expects the result to lead to a run-off vote between Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai.

A Harare court yesterday rejected an attempt by Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change to block the recounts that it says will be used to fraudulently overturn the opposition's newly won majority in parliament, which forced Zanu-PF into opposition for the first time since independence, and to inflate the presidential vote in favor of Mugabe.

The Zimbabwe president's hour-long speech at a stadium in Highfield, a Harare township where his Zanu-PF party was founded but which is now solidly pro-opposition, began with extended denunciations of Britain in English and Shona.

"We need to maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations and the machinations of other detractors who are allies of Britain," said Mugabe.

"Yesterday they ruled by brute force. Today they have perfected their tactics to be more subtle. They are literally buying people to betray their government and accept to be politically manipulated in abandoning their rights. We are being bought like sheep because they have money and because we are suffering."

Mugabe, whose election campaign characterized a vote for the MDC as surrendering the country to British control and the return of white farmers, kept up the theme yesterday.

"Things will never ever change, never ever change to the extent that they can come back and reoccupy our farms, our land. Zimbabwe will never be a colony again," he said. "Down with the British. Down with thieves who want to steal our country."

Mugabe also touched on the deepening economic crisis which saw inflation surge to 165,000% this week, but again he blamed Britain.

On Thursday, the state-run Herald newspaper published documents that purport to show various plots linking Tsvangirai to a range of hate figures from Gordon Brown to the Afrikaner neo-Nazi leader, Eugéne Terre'Blanche, as well as accusing the MDC of planning "Rwanda-style massacres".

The justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, called Tsvangirai a traitor and threatened to deal with him as such. The opposition said the documents were fake.

The British embassy denied a Herald story claiming Gordon Brown had written to Tsvangirai promising to support him and to lobby the UN security council to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe's government. "No such letter, or wider correspondence, exists. It reflects the regime's desperation that Zanu-PF and state-controlled media have resorted to faking documents for crude propaganda purposes, and not for the first time," said the embassy in a statement.

All but one of today's recounts are in constituencies lost by Zanu-PF to the MDC. If the results in just nine of the 23 constituencies are reversed, Mugabe's party will regain its majority in parliament.

The state-run election commission says the recounts are necessary after the police arrested 11 commission officials for allegedly tampering with the results to diminish Mugabe's proportion of the vote.

But the MDC says it suspects the recount is in part a rigging exercise and also a tactic to delay the final declaration of the presidential result while Zanu-PF unleashes a wave of violence and intimidation against the opposition in rural areas ahead of the expected run-off vote.

Yesterday, Mugabe accused the MDC of plotting violence. "We know some people are planning that there will be places where there will be violence, with people burning shops and cars," he said. "Those who are planning this, please stop it immediately otherwise you are going to be in serious trouble with us."

The MDC's secretary-general, Tendai Biti, held talks with Kenya's new prime minister, Raila Odinga, yesterday to seek advice on how he faced down President Mwai Kibaki's attempts to steal the election earlier this year.

"Kenya is special to us, it is not by accident that we came to the office of the prime minister," Biti said in Nairobi.

But the MDC has sought to avoid the kind of violence that claimed at least 1,500 lives in Kenya, many of them ethnic killings, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.