Brussels | Saturday
ZIMBABWE’S President Robert Mugabe and his entourage should face targeted personal sanctions if he fails to allow free and fair elections next year, a think-tank said in a report published this weekend.
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other key global players should carefully coordinate policy towards Zimbabwe to prevent it from sinking deeper into chaos.
”It is up to the people of Zimbabwe to determine their future — but at the moment they have no chance of being able to do that, and the pro-reform movement needs all the international support it can get,” said ICG president Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister.
The ICG report calls for a Zimbabwe strategy similar to the one adopted by Western governments towards Yugoslavia in their ultimately successful bid to oust former president Slobodan Milosevic and restore democracy in the Balkan country.
The strategy would include imposing travel restrictions and a freeze on assets held overseas by Mugabe, his family and senior members of his ZANU-PF party.
The Commonwealth, which groups Britain and its former colonies, should suspend Zimbabwe’s membership when it next meets in Australia in October, the ICG said.
Its proposals would come into effect if Mugabe failed to meet certain conditions for the 2002 presidential election.
These conditions would include establishing an independent election commission, reorganisation of voter rolls, international monitoring before, during and after the election and a free rein for the media, the ICG said.
The think-tank also said the World Bank and donor governments should try to resolve the troubled land issue with Zimbabwe before the election takes place.
Zimbabwe has been suffering an economic and political crisis since February when self-styled war veterans, encouraged by the state, seized hundreds of white-owned farms across the country.
The land chaos has sparked fears of food shortages. Zimbabwe has run out of foreign exchange, while inflation and unemployment are at record levels.
Mugabe says Britain must pay compensation for the thousands of farms the state plans to seize and redistribute to blacks. London says it will not finance land reform amid chaos and disregard for the rule of law.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwean Information Minister Jonathan Moyo announced on Saturday the government is preparing a law targetting ”unprofessionalism in journalism” practised, according to him, by the independent opposition press.
Moyo, whose remarks were broadcast on state television, accused the opposition press of ”inventing stories”, in particular concerning alleged rifts between President Robert Mugabe and his vice president, and between the latter and other government ministers.
”That kind of misconduct needs legislative intervention,” Moyo said.
He added that the legislation being envisaged would protect ”the privacy of both public (officials) and private citizens.”
Relations between Mugabe’s government and the independent local and the foreign media is severely strained.
The authorities have forced three foreign journalists to leave the country this year and has enacted a law that has effectively blocked private broadcasters from operating.
The printing press of the nation’s only private daily paper, the Daily News, was destroyed in a January 2001 bomb blast. Many local journalists have become victims of aggression and intimidation by the authorities. – Reuters, AFP