Harare/Johannesburg - President Robert Mugabe's government Friday shrugged off a decision by Edinburgh University to strip the longtime leader of an honorary degree, saying the university had humiliated itself through the unprecedented action. "Such actions by the university are indeed a humiliation to the university itself, not the President of Zimbabwe," Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said in comments carried by the official Herald daily.
"I say so because the university has taken unorthodox means of making decisions based on propaganda and hearsay," the minister added.
This week the Senate of Edinburgh University revoked the degree given to Mugabe in 1984 for services rendered to education in Africa.
The action followed years of campaigning by students and Scottish lawmakers concerned by mounting rights abuses by Mugabes government.
The senate said it also took into consideration evidence now available of atrocities carried out by Mugabe's government in the early 1980s. The evidence was not available at the time the degree was awarded.
It cited the massacre of an estimated 20,000 civilians in the western Matabeleland provinces by the army, ostensibly in an operation to quell banditry by rebels loyal to then opposition leader Joshua Nkomo.
But in his comments Friday, Ndlovu said the university senate had been "swayed by ill-informed students, and by pressure from Prime Minister Tony Blair's government."
"Those people who awarded him the honorary degree are not the people who are now withdrawing it," he added.
"The students who are there are not the same as those who were there at the time, who gave him a red carpet at the awards," he said.
Observers say the action by Edinburgh University might be emulated by other Western universities keen to dissociate themselves from Mugabe.
There have also been calls from both houses of the British parliament to strip Mugabe of a knighthood conferred on him by Queen Elizabeth in 1994.
