20100910
africanews

Zimbabwe wants normal ties with Western powers critical of its policies but will press ahead with a plan to hand control of foreign companies to local blacks, President Mugabe said. Mugabe that his government was waiting for positive movement from the US and EU to mend ties soured over the last decade by rows over the seizures of white-owned farms for landless blacks and charges of rights abuses and election fraud.

"We never refuse to talk to anybody," he said when Reuters asked whether he was prepared to talk to Washington and Brussels.
"But what I don't understand about the Europeans and the Americans is the negative attitude. How do they expect the kind of cold war they decided to wage on us, how do they intend it to end?"
Talks to improve ties with the EU have stalled over slow political reforms in Harare while U.S. President Barack Obama said last month he was "heartbroken" by Zimbabwe's decline.

Mugabe -- who last month told Western powers to go "to hell" over sanctions imposed on his ZANU-PF party -- said on Thursday: "They have imposed unjustified and illegal sanctions on us. The sanctions are comparable to the military aggression in Iraq".

Mugabe said some Western countries had hoped that sanctions on Zimbabwe would help push him out of power.
"That kind of regime change is the exclusive right of the people of Zimbabwe ... I am born here and if my people want me to go, I go."

The 86-year-old leader said he hoped Obama and new British Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg would move to mend ties between Harare and the West.

"We are waiting to see what Cameron and Clegg will do and Obama also will do in regard to our situation and our relations," Mugabe said.

"If they decide the relations should remain what they are, then we will know that they too are aggressors and not different from their predecessors, but we are giving them a chance."

The United States and European Union imposed sanctions on state firms and travel restrictions on Mugabe and dozens of his associates nearly 10 years ago after a violent re-election campaign and at the start of often violent commercial farm seizures.

Mugabe was forced into a power-sharing pact with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, more than a year ago after a crisis over a 2008 national election that local and foreign observers say was marred by violence and vote-rigging.