British Government cannot say they did not know Mugabe is a Psychopath

British knew Mugabe was a ruthless killer of his own people before Independence - By Trevor Grundy.

The last British Governor of Rhodesia, Lord (Christopher) Soames and one of his key advisers, Robin Renwick, were fully aware that Robert Mugabe ordered ZANLA guerrillas to execute, in public, village headmen who did not support him during the election that led to Zanu (PF)’s landslide win in March 1980.
Asked during a BBC Scotland radio interview (19 April) if he had any “inner fears” about the British Government ‘s decision to “install” Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister, Lord Renwick said: “Yes, I did because I had seen his methods for winning power in existence at villages at night. His forces would execute publicly any headman, or local person who had the courage to oppose him.” He added, “but at that time they were fighting against white rule and they did have support. He did have majority support and this is why we installed him and his government as the first government of the democratic Zimbabwe.”
Lord Renwick spoke to the BBC about his long-hidden doubts about Robert Mugabe as the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, spoke in America about the need for transparency in Zimbabwe.
Mr Brown warned the Zimbabweans leader that the international community was losing patience following his refusal to release the results of the March 2008 presidential and general election.
Lord Renwick told his interviewer in Glasgow that the British were duty-bound to speak out against what is happening in Zimbabwe. “We owe it to the people of Zimbabwe and certainly the Opposition who have had the most enormous courage, who have lived with most terrible threats, provocation, murders, beatings, torture to say what we believe.”
He said “It is perfectly obvious that he has lost this election. He has surrounded himself with a gang of thieves. It’s basically a Mafia-run country. The reason they support him is, very simply, he has tied them to him by giving them large tracts of land confiscated from white farmers. Land re-settlement was intended to benefit the people of Zimbabwe, not cronies in the regime.”
Robin Renwick joined the Foreign Office shortly after leaving Cambridge University. He was in the Rhodesia Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office between 1978 -1980 when he joined Lord Soames in Salisbury and helped turn Rhodesia towards Zimbabwe. His 1997 book “Unconventional Diplomacy in Southern Africa” tells stories that illuminate the last days of white –rule in Rhodesia and the birth of Zimbabwe.
Robin Renwick was an admirer – albeit a cautious one - of Robert Mugabe despite the fact that Mugabe was a terrorist at heart, a man who believed – and who obviously still believes - that the bullet rather than the ballot is the most ruthlessly efficient way of gaining and then keeping power.
On April 5, Lord (Peter) Carrington (the internationally acclaimed architect of a peaceful settlement to the Rhodesian problem at Lancaster House, London in 1979) revealed in an article published in “The Times” that President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania – the most influential and morally respectable of all the African heads of state fighting for majority rule in Rhodesia- told him that if Mugabe did not win, he (President Nyerere) would simply refuse to accept the result.
Asked if he could see anyway of breaking the circle of fear and state terror in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Lord Renwick said that he could. “I think that more effective sanctions could be applied and the most effective sanction would be to make clear that Mugabe and his senior ministers and the Forces chiefs have already engaged in and are currently engaging in crimes against humanity and if this continues we will be engaged in having them arraigned in front of the International Court in The Hague in exactly the same way Milosevic and his bunch of thugs were. Now that won’t affect Mugabe because he will try to hold out anyway but it will certainly worry some of those who are at present helping him stay in power.”

-African Forum News Services (AFNS)