Mugabe says China aid doesn’t require Zimbabwe to ’embrace homosexuality’

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe told a Chinese TV interviewer that he resents Western international aid because it always carries conditions such as accepting homosexuality.

The Telegraph reports that Mugabe praised Beijing for being “very constructive” in its assistance towards Zimbabwe, remarking that aid from Europe and America “always attach conditions,” and that the West always wants African leaders to “embrace homosexuality.”

Mugabe, 90, who regularly refers to gays as “pigs” and “dogs,” has threatened to expel foreign diplomats who promote gay rights in the southern African country.

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Male homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe, and in 2006 the country’s government amended the law which now states that sodomy is any “act involving contact between two males that would be regarded by a reasonable person as an indecent act,” thereby criminalizing holding hands, hugging, or kissing.

Mugabe said his country will not give in to Western demands for Africans to decriminalize “sodomy.”

He has previously called for the beheading of gays.

Mugabe’s latest comments came during a trip to China in which he was trying to generate support for Zimbabwe’s crumbling economy.