Harare: Zimbabwe`s President on Friday said he wants South Africa`s ruling African National Congress to block an investigation in South Africa into alleged violence and atrocities by loyalists of his party.
President Robert Mugabe, speaking at a convention of southern African liberation movements in Harare, called the probe ordered by a South African court a "racist assault" by embittered Zimbabwean and South African whites.
In May, a South African judge ordered his country`s prosecutors to investigate alleged human rights abuses and torture in Zimbabwe in a case filed by a human rights group and Zimbabwean exiles. Those who brought the case, both whites and blacks, say they have documented abuses and envision a trial in South Africa.
Mugabe urged South African leaders to "apply every means at their disposal" to prevent the case souring relations between the two countries that fought a common struggle to end white rule.
He said whites in southern Africa, including white Judge Hans Fabricius who made the probe ruling, are trying to makes excuses for their defeat by the forces of African liberation.
He called the judge "a boer”, a pejorative term for whites, and said Fabricius has no jurisdiction in Zimbabwe and does not understand the way international law works.
The ruling came at the instigation of those "still in our midst yearning for the old flags" of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence in 1980, and apartheid-era South Africa, Mugabe insisted.
He told representatives of the liberation groups of the ANC, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe that Africa has come under renewed attack from former colonisers determined to replace revolutionary parties with "malleable stooges”.
PTI
