HARARE (AFP) — Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old leader with a stranglehold on power in Zimbabwe since 1980, has remained defiant in the face of harsh criticism, vowing recently that "only God" can remove him from office.
The veteran president was almost certainly handed another victory on Sunday when his longtime rival, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, announced he was pulling out of this week's run-off election.
Through most of his 28 years in power, the former guerrilla leader has faced little serious political opposition, but results from the March 29 first round vote showed he finished second behind Tsvangirai.
Parliamentary elections held on the same day resulted in his ZANU-PF party losing control for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980 to Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change.
But in speeches ahead of the run-off, the feisty Mugabe has shown he was in no mood to shuffle off into retirement even as Britain and the United States have put pressure on him to go.
He has said the opposition will never come to power as long as he is alive, vowing to fight to ensure it does not happen.
"Should this country be taken by traitors... it is impossible," Mugabe said recently, referring to the MDC, in a speech given at the burial of a former independence fighter.
"It shall never happen... as long as we are alive and those who fought for the country are alive," he said. "We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it."
He has also threatened to arrest MDC leaders over violence that mounted ahead of the vote, though the UN has said Mugabe supporters were responsible for the bulk of it.
Since the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on his inner circle after accusations that he rigged his 2002 victory over Tsvangirai, Mugabe has shown no willingness to mend fences.
Western leaders have routinely lashed out at him, with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently saying Zimbabwe was now run by a "criminal cabal".
Mugabe has hit back in typical fashion, accusing Western powers of seeking "illegal regime change" in his country.
He had previously indicated he would step down at the end of his current term but he was back fighting again after loyalists of his ZANU-PF party endorsed his candidacy in December.
An intellectual who initially embraced Marxism, Mugabe was widely praised when he won the election that ended white minority rule in 1980, a few weeks after Zimbabwe gained independence.
Born on February 21, 1924, at Kutama Mission, northwest of Harare, he qualified as a teacher at the age of 17.
He took his first political steps at Fort Hare University in South Africa, where he met many of southern Africa's future nationalist leaders.
Mugabe then resumed teaching, moving to Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and Ghana before returning to what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1960.
As a member of various banned nationalist parties, he was detained with other leaders in 1964 and spent the next 10 years in prison camps or jail.
He used that period to consolidate his position in the Zimbabwe African National Union and emerged from prison in November 1974 as ZANU leader. He then left for Mozambique, from where his banned party conducted a guerrilla war.
Economic sanctions and war forced Rhodesian leader Ian Smith to negotiate.
After ZANU, which drew most of its support from the ethnic Shona majority, swept to power in the 1980 election, Mugabe announced a policy of reconciliation with the country's white minority but most subsequently left.
Mugabe also crushed dissent among the minority Ndebele people with his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade in a campaign that killed an estimated 20,000 suspected "dissidents".
In his early years, Mugabe was widely credited with improving health and education for the black majority. But social services later declined and the AIDS epidemic shattered gains in healthcare.
Inflation has now soared to what is officially more than 165,000 percent and there are shortages of basic foodstuffs across the country. Some 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line.
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