Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Tuesday non-Africans should not demonise Zimbabwe?s President Robert Mugabe for his land reform programme, which has seized white farms to give to landless blacks.

Museveni, on a rare official state visit to Harare, said his trip was intended to show that Africa stood behind Mugabe, who has been pilloried in the West for both the land reforms and his controversial election in 2002 which Zimbabwe?s opposition and several Western countries charged was rigged.

?I don?t see why Zimbabwe should be ostracised because of this issue of the land matter which was mishandled by the Tony Blairs, including the original creators of the problem, the British,? Museveni told a joint press briefing late on Tuesday. ?I don?t see how anybody in Europe or outside Africa can demonise the leader of a liberation movement ... These are the founding fathers of Africa, you can?t demonise these people,? he said.

A defiant Mugabe earlier said his government would not be bullied into abandoning the controversial land reform policy despite the fact it had created ?enemies? for Zimbabwe among Western countries, including former colonial ruler Britain. Mugabe has seized hundreds of white-owned farms in the last four years to resettle landless blacks, saying he was correcting imbalances created by more than 90 years of British colonialism. But his critics say the seizures violated property rights and amount to racism against whites. Speaking at a state dinner on Monday, Mugabe said Zimbabwe believed Africans had to be vigilant in fighting for their rights and in their struggle for economic development.

?Your visit will, therefore, afford you the opportunity to see that our land reform programme, which Britain and her Western allies viciously oppose, has put indigenous Zimbabweans at the centre of economic activity,? Mugabe told Museveni, who ends a three-day visit to Zimbabwe on Wednesday. The visit by Museveni, one of East Africa?s influential leaders, is seen as a show of political solidarity with Mugabe, and as bolstering his standing on a continent where he has enjoyed diplomatic support despite calls for his isolation by Western opponents and the domestic opposition.

Mugabe said land reforms ? which critics say have reduced a once regional breadbasket country to one now struggling with food shortages ? had economically empowered a majority of Zimbabweans. The veteran Zimbabwean leader, in power since independence in 1980, said Museveni had been invited for a state visit to help improve bilateral relations that had been temporarily strained by a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Cris CHINAKA