FORMER British Prime Minister Tony Blair was prepared to ignore concerns about human rights abuses against President Robert Mugabe in pursuit of increased trade with Zimbabwe, according to freshly-released official documents.

Blair secretly courted Mugabe in an effort to win lucrative trade deals for Britain soon after the Labour party swept to power in1997 , Foreign Office and Downing Street correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act showed on Monday.

The UK Independent newspaper reports that just weeks after Blair unveiled his government’s ethical foreign policy in May 1997, he wrote a personal letter to Mugabe congratulating him on his role in unifying Africa and helping to improve relations between the continent and Britain.

The signed message, which welcomed Mugabe's appointment as leader of the Organisation of African Unity, paved the way for an attempt to bring the two leaders together in a face-to-face meeting in Downing Street during the first weeks of the New Labour administration.

Revelations about Labour's early links with Mugabe come as Blair prepares to publish his autobiography in which he casts himself as a force for good in world affairs.

But the secret documents show how, despite international condemnation of Mugabe's government, Blair was secretly negotiating to establish close trading and political relations with Zimbabwe.

At this time, Mugabe was under growing pressure to accept responsibility for "crimes against humanity" in which thousands of Matabeleland civilians were killed by the Fifth Brigade in 1983-87.

Mugabe and Blair finally met in October that year at the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh. Mugabe told Blair that he wanted Britain to fund Zimbabwe’s land reform programme in which half a million hectares of white-owned farmland were to be redistributed among black farmers.

Weeks earlier, a Foreign Office briefing to Blair argued the advantages of meeting the African President outweighed human rights concerns.

In a letter dated June 11, the Foreign Office urged the Prime Minister to accede to Mugabe's request for an official visit to Downing Street.

The memo reads: "This may be a useful opportunity for an exchange of views in advance of CHOGM [the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting]. After South Africa, Zimbabwe is the most important country in southern Africa to us both commercially and politically.

“Despite domestic criticism arriving from recent financial scandals, and his failure so far to respond to renewed serious allegations by Zimbabwean NGOs of his involvement in atrocities in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, Mugabe remains a senior African and Commonwealth figure with whom there would be advantage in establishing early close relations. We recommend that the Prime Minister sees him if his programme permits."

No 10 wrote back to the Foreign Office saying that Blair could not make the date suggested by Mugabe. A second Foreign Office letter later urges Blair to hold the meeting in September. But this time Blair's commitments prevented the two leaders meeting.

In the run-up to the Commonwealth conference, Mugabe was optimistic about forging closer ties with Britain. "I have great hopes of Tony Blair," he said. "Mrs Thatcher described me as a terrorist but Tony Blair is different."

Mugabe’s budding relations with Blair were to be strained for good when Britain's International Development Secretary Claire Short wrote a letter to Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Minister Kumbirai Kangai in November 1997 in which she stated that "we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe".

She went on to write: "We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

In the same letter she did, however, offer qualified support for land reform: "We do recognise the very real issues you face over land reform ... we would be prepared to support a programme of land reform that was part of a poverty eradication strategy, but not on any other basis.”