OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday 7.00pm.
PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki pledged on Thursday to help Zimbabwe solve its land crisis, but avoided criticising either President Robert Mugabe or former colonial power Britain over the dispute.
Addressing the nation in a live broadcast, the president also moved to debunk fears that the country will go the same way as Zimbabwe.
However in his 15-minute speech, he made no mention of new initiatives on Zimbabwe, merely saying he will ”support and promote” the outcome of talks with Mugabe in Victoria Falls last month, and of talks between Britain and Zimbabwe in London.
He also remained mute on the intimidation and murder of political opponents of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the president’s hardline statements on Wednesday that he will not order the invaders to leave the farms.
Instead Mbeki told his domestic detractors that South Africa will not adopt a ”counter-productive holier-than-thou attitude” towards the crisis north of its border.
”Together with them [Mugabe and Britain], our government will work persistently and without making the noise of empty drums, to help the sister people of Zimbabwe to find a just and lasting solution to the real and pressing land question in their country,” he said.
Mbeki, who has been under intense international pressure to repudiate Mugabe’s handling of a nine-week-old land grab in which at least 18 people have died, said the crisis arose from the failure to implement a 1998 agreement with Britain to correct the skewed post-colonial distribution of land.
While criticising the media’s coverage of the crisis, he said Mugabe had agreed in talks two weeks ago to support an end to violence on the farms and to ”create the conditions for the withdrawal” of thousands of 1970s liberation-war veterans from white-owned farms they have occupied.
But he did not comment on Mugabe’s renewed support for the occupations in a key speech on Wednesday or his demand that whites should hand over half the land they control. — Reuters