Opposition lashes Mugabe

President Mugabe wants to give land to black farmers

A Zimbabwean opposition leader has hit out at President Robert Mugabe, calling him a "deranged despot" who is inciting violence in a bid to cling to power.

Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said Mr Mugabe was waging war on his own people.

Zimbabwe is a state whose leader is commonly perceived as a deranged despot

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai

His comments came as both opposition and pro-government supporters held demonstrations which appear to have passed peacefully.

There had been widespread fears of violence at the end of what correspondents have described as one of the most volatile weeks in Zimbabwe since it became independent in 1980.

Hundreds of white-owned farms have been subject to sustained hostility by Mr Mugabe's supporters in a campaign of intimidation designed to drive them from the land.

'Political harassment'

In a full-page advertisement taken out in the Sunday Standard newspaper, Mr Tsvangirai said: "Today we face a government that is threatening war on its own citizens if they fail to endorse its survival."

Tsvangirai: Mugabe is waging war on his people

He accused the government of "pursuing an authoritarian political culture, economic policies that violate the basic rights of its citizens, and a short-term land policy that threatens to destabilise the food security of this country".

On the international stage, Mr Tsvangirai said, the government has transformed a country once much respected in the community of nations into "a state whose leader is commonly perceived as a deranged despot".

"How can we have a leader who swears ... that he will kill people for refusing to support him?" Mr Tsvangirai asked.

Rallies

The opposition movement held a rally in Norton, 50 km(30 miles) south-west of the capital Harare on Sunday, as government supporters held their own rally in Harare demanding that the government start redistributing land before elections in May.

In Norton, helmeted police bearing weapons stood by as up to 1,000 members of the MDC gathered. Police surrounded a field full of opposition supporters. Police guard posts and checkpoints were beefed up in the town.

War veterans surround a barricaded farm

There had been fears of violence after war veterans and other government supporters attacked peaceful opposition protesters in the capital last weekend. Police were accused of failing to stop the violence.

Zimbabwean war veterans, who are occupying white-owned farms, have called on the government to start redistributing land before elections in May because they do not trust politicians to enact a new land law.

"After the elections it will be difficult, as you are aware politicians always want to sit on things," war veterans leader Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi said in a Sunday newspaper.

On Friday, Mr Mugabe told white farmers that he would fight any opposition to his plan to seize their land and give it away to poor black people.

He told an election rally that his government no longer intended to ask for the land; it would take it without negotiation. Any whites who objected should leave the country.