'Mugabe's like Idi Amin'

2005-07-30 18:23

Kampala - Uganda's main state-run newspaper on Friday slammed Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, comparing his policies to those of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in a rare rebuke of a fellow African leader.

In an editorial lamenting the state of affairs in Zimbabwe, The New Vision newspaper said Mugabe's controversial land reform programme and recent demolition of shantytowns were akin to steps taken during Amin's disastrous rule.

"Zimbabwe is starving," said the paper which is owned by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's Movement organisation and has until now been silent on the situation that many African governments have refused to condemn.

Extreme suffering, abject poverty

Mugabe's government "is subjecting its own poor citizens to extreme suffering with unplanned slum demolitions," it said, noting that Zimbabwe was also seeking food aid in contrast to neighbouring South Africa.

"Both countries are working out long-term legacies following a history of white minority rule," the paper said. "But that is where the similarities end."

"In Zimbabwe, the Mugabe government appears to have its own survival as the primary focus," it said. "It has played the populist card in grabbing land from white commercial farmers and rewarded its cronies.

"This has resonance in the Ugandan experience when the Amin government grabbed businesses from the Asian community in 1972, precipitating economic collapse we are yet to fully recover from," the New Vision said.

Zimbabwe's economy under strain

It referred to the campaign embarked on by Amin, one of Africa's most notorious dictators, to expel long-term South Asian residents who had come to Uganda during British colonial rule and formed the mainstay of the economy.

About 90 000 mainly Indians and Pakistanis were driven from the country as a result, causing economic chaos and driving the already destitute nation into further impoverishment, a situation the paper existed now in Zimbabwe.

"Zimbabwe's economy has duly collapsed, there is no food coming from farms that had long been a food basket for the region," it said, praising South Africa's less drastic land redistribution program as "how it should be".

The United Nations and many western nations have denounced Harare's slum demolitions that have left 700 000 people homeless and disrupted the lives of a further 2.4 million people but most of Africa has remained mute on the subject.

- AFP