Mugabe blasts Rice, Blair

Mugabe on Friday also blasted British Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling him a “bliar” for “telling lies to the rest of Europe” about repression in Zimbabwe.

Launching the election campaign for his ruling party for parliamentary elections scheduled for March, Mugabe criticised Rice for describing Zimbabwe as an outpost of tyranny.

He hit back at “that girl born out of the slave ancestry, who should know from the history of slavery in America, from the present situation of blacks in America that the white man is not a friend”. 

Slavery slur 
  
“The white man is the slave master to her,” said Mugabe in a two-hour speech launching his party campaign.
 

Mugabe claims Rice is following the orders of her white master

“She says Zimbabwe is one of the five or six outposts of tyranny. Ah well, she has got to echo her master’s voice,” he declared.
 
If Zimbabwe were indeed a tyranny, Mugabe argued, “the first person to lose his head would be Ian Smith”, who led the white-minority government in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was called before independence in 1980.
 
“We have kept him and protected that head. He eats our food, lives in our home comfortably and is protected by our rules of law and order,” said Mugabe.
  
Smith, who was prime minister from 1965 to 1979, lives on a farm outside Harare and has remained an outspoken critic of Mugabe.
 
Mugabe set the tone for the campaign for the parliamentary elections in which his Zanu-PF is widely expected to consolidate its hold on power. 

Critical of Blair

“The Blair I know is a bliar. He goes telling lies to the rest of Europe that the problem here is the lack of democracy … lack of human rights, lack of transparency,” Mugabe said. 

“How many countries in the world have been as consistent with elections, holding them in a timely fashion, even in Africa here I want to know,” he asked.
 
In his speech to thousands of party members, Mugabe also spoke about food shortages as his government admitted for the first time in a year that there are people in need of food aid in the country.
  
He admitted that he had been ill advised to sell food reserves in a bid to earn desperately needed foreign exchange, adding: “Now we are going to build our reserves again.”