“There is no doubt that Mugabe is a terrorist. He is like Bin Laden,” Sikhala told a full house at a New Zimbabwe Lecture Series talk forum on Thursday evening.
Just like the fugitive Bin Laden, Sikhala said, Mugabe uses terror to prevail over his political rivals.
“They are both terrorists. They trust terror as an instrument of political organization. There is no doubt in Africa that nobody can infuse fear into people more than Robert Mugabe. The international community must realise that there is an Osama Bin Laden in Zimbabwe in the form of Robert Mugabe,”he said.
Sikhala, who in March lost his seat to Marvelous Khumalo of the rival MDC faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai, said the MDC has been defeating Mugabe and his Zanu PF since its formation in 1999 – but the 84 year old leader has retained an iron grip on his rule through terror.
The militant former legislator has been tortured on several occasions by security agents in Zimbabwe.
He has also escaped alleged assassination attempts by Mugabe’s supporters during campaigns to drum up support for MDC candidates in past by-elections.
Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, is accused of unleashing his North Korean trained Fifth Brigade to massacre the then opposition leader Dr Joshua Nkomo’s supporters in the western Matebeleland provinces during the 1980s.
More than 20 000 mostly Ndebele people are reported to have died during the holocaust.
The Zimbabwean leader was almost pushed out of office in 2000 and 2002 when a united MDC curtailed his party’s parliamentary dominance by winning
57 seats within a year of its formation.
Mugabe came under intense international censure when he unleashed former fighters of the 1970s war of liberation to expropriate and redistribute land, formerly owned by white farmers in a bid to win support among Zimbabwe’s rural poor. – Radio VOP
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