Robert Mugabe
President of Zimbabwe and the leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union or ZANU-PF He was previously the Prime Minister from 1980 to 1987 and a leader of nationalist forces in the Second Chimurenga from 1964 to 1979.
Do you know what Mugabe has done? He's taken people's identity and literally if you don't mind, cut it to pieces. This is what he's actually done, to a lot of – and in the end there's nothing. So as far as I'm concerned from now on I'm not going to wear a dog collar until Mugabe's gone.
Internal discipline is what he's mastered. What to do with anger, for instance: he is able to control it and not show it. He can sit face to face with his opponents and detractors, smiling and talking and listening, even if he's boiling inside. That's where he keeps his anger - inside.
He believed profoundly in his people, the living as well as the dead. You can say of some Africans that there is a thin veneer of civilisation as we know it in the West. But Mugabe, who was undoubtedly civilised and much better educated than most of us, still held African beliefs very dearly in his heart. I think this is one of the reasons he pushed the white farmers off the land. He was always acutely aware that African beliefs reside in the soil. He always believed very, very strongly that nobody had the right to give or take away the land of the people because that meant giving away the ancestors who held the whole nation together.
The Commonwealth is a mere club, but it has become like an 'Animal Farm' where some members are more equal than others. How can Blair claim to regulate and direct events and still say all of us are equals?
Mr Bush, Mr. Blair and now Mr Brown's sense of human rights precludes our people's right to their God-given resources, which in their view must be controlled by their kith and kin. I am termed dictator because I have rejected this supremacist view and frustrated the neo-colonialists.
It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.
We cannot have a situation where people decide to sit in places not allowed and when police remove them they say no. We can’t have that. That is a revolt to the system. Some are crying that they were beaten. Yes you will be thoroughly beaten. When the police say move you move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force.
I will never, never, never, never surrender. Zimbabwe is mine. I am a Zimbabwean. Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe never for the British. Britain for the British.
President Mugabe is like a lion — when he roars, he leaves some quotable quotes that linger in the mind for a very long time.
With his poor childhood development record, even minor criticism would be experienced as a wound by Mugabe. He is a person who cannot tolerate difference. Being profoundly doubtful about himself, he is oversensitive to the idea that he is not as good as everyone else. People are either with him or against him. Differences of opinion are provocative and hurtful to Mugabe, who may think that compromise reduces him. The closer a compromise comes to his emotional self, the more he resists it.
He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush's law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!
We are still exchanging blows with the British government. They are using gay gangsters. Each time I pass through London, the gangster regime of Blair `expresses its dismay'.
Mugabe wasn't human at all. You couldn't warm to him as a person. You could admire his skills and intellect and so on, but he was an awfully slippery sort of person - reptilian, as I say.
Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!
Let Blair and the British government take note and listen. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans. Our people are overjoyed. The land is ours. We are now the rulers and owners of Zimbabwe.
When they criticise the government when it tries to prevent violence and punish perpetrators of that violence we take the position that they can go hang.
I believe that Mugabe was ... driven into a permanent rage by the adulation heaped internationally on Nelson Mandela, an accolade of praise and recognition that he felt was more properly due to himself. And, harboring this grievance, he decided to denude his own unhappy country of anything that might remind anybody of Mandela's legacy.
He was a very clever bloke and he worked with me for as long as he thought it was going to help him. Once again, it was just to keep himself in power. I give that answer to all questions about Mugabe because that is all there is to it. Everything he has ever done is about keeping himself in power: Dictators and fascists all over the world think like that.
What we hate is not the color of their skins but the evil that emanates from them.
Our economy is a hundred times better, than the average African economy. Outside South Africa, what country is [as good as] Zimbabwe? … What is lacking now are goods on the shelves—that is all.