{"id":12067,"date":"2013-11-28T10:45:28","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T10:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12067"},"modified":"2013-11-28T12:35:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T12:35:38","slug":"blair-denies-plotting-to-oust-mugabe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12067","title":{"rendered":"Blair denies plotting to oust Mugabe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Struggling<\/a>
Struggling to influence the natives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister\u00a0denied on Wednesday that he put pressure South Africa while he was in office to remove Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe in a military operation.<\/p>\n

Thabo Mbeki,\u00a0South Africa\u2019s ex-president, said in\u00a0an interview that Britain wanted to topple Mugabe during the political and economic crisis of the late 2000s.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Blair\u2019s denied the charge.<\/p>\n

\u201cTony Blair has long believed that Zimbabwe would be much better off without Robert Mugabe and always argued for a tougher stance against him, but he never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention,\u201d he told AFP in London.\u00a0Blair stepped down in 2007.<\/p>\n

This was not the account Mbeki gave to Al-Jazeera news channel,\u00a0in the interview published on November 23<\/p>\n

Mbeki said:\u00a0\u201cTony Blair… was saying to the chief of the British armed forces: \u2019You must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe’.\u00a0We knew that because we had come under the same pressure, that we need to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime-change scheme even to the point of using military force.”<\/p>\n

Mbeki\u2019s spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga told AFP the ex-president stood by his words.<\/p>\n

Mbeki, who led South Africa from 1999 to 2008, was the head mediator between Mugabe and his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai after violent attacks followed disputed polls in 2008.<\/p>\n

Mugabe and rival \u00a0Morgan Tsvangirai\u00a0formed a power-sharing government which ended with Mugabe\u2019s election victory on July 31 this year.<\/p>\n

Mbeki had always called for a negotiated solution, resisting neo-colonialism.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy does it become a British responsibility to decide who leads the people of Zimbabwe?\u201d he told Al-Jazeera.<\/p>\n

In November 2007 Zimbabwe put its military on high alert after retired UK army chief Lord Charles Guthrie said London had discussed invading its former colony during Tony Blair\u2019s premiership.<\/p>\n

Mugabe, 89, has governed since former Rhodesia won its independence in 1980.<\/p>\n

Relations with Britain turned sour after land reform programmes seized farms from white farmers without compensation \u2014 the majority of them of British descent \u2014 to give to black farmers.<\/p>\n

On the same day stories of an affair between Blair and Wendy Deng, the Chinese wife of press mogul Rupert Murdoch, also surfaced again.\u00a0Sources close to Murdoch in London claim that Blair, 60, and Deng, 44, had ‘multiple encounters’ without 82-year-old Murdoch’s knowledge.<\/p>\n

Blair denied an affair with Deng.\u00a0A ‘terminal’ rift has severed relations between Murdoch and Blair however over reports of Blair’s friendship with the entrepreneur’s wife.<\/p>\n

A friend of Murdoch said: “Rupert Murdoch will have nothing more to do with Tony Blair. Not ever.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister\u00a0denied on Wednesday that he put pressure South Africa while he was in office to remove Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe in a military operation. Thabo Mbeki,\u00a0South Africa\u2019s ex-president, said in\u00a0an interview that Britain wanted to topple Mugabe during the political and economic crisis of the late 2000s. A spokesperson … Continue reading “Blair denies plotting to oust Mugabe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[7642,7641,7643,179,922,180],"class_list":["post-12067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-ex-president-thabo-mbeki","tag-former-british-prime-minister","tag-neo-colonialism","tag-robert-mugabe","tag-tony-blair","tag-zimbabwe"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/blairmbeki.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12067"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12075,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12067\/revisions\/12075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}