Michael Hartnack in Harare
President Robert Mugabe hopes this week to pull off his second great diplomatic coup of the 18-month Zimbabwean crisis: getting his neighbours to accept it stems from white ownership of prime farmland rather than from his own efforts to cling to power.
President Thabo Mbeki will be among the presidents of seven states Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe who are meet in Harare on Monday for a two-day summit.
But already South Africa is signalling it has a widely different perception from Mugabe’s by declaring the gathering reflects concern at the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe on the region.
In recent weeks Mugabe has boasted publicly to his Parliament of having won “unanimity within not only the Southern African Development Community [SADC] but the African Union” that his position is “just and reasonable”.
Sources within Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) acknowledge that Mugabe has already scored one signal diplomatic victory in the year since the June 2000 general election. He got the world to accept it was a “bankable” poll and gave his Zanu-PF government legitimacy despite 8 000 catalogued human rights abuses, including 40 murders. The MDC, which came from nowhere to capture 57 of the 120 elected seats, believes it would have swept to power with at least 80 seats in anything remotely like fair elections, but has lost its chance to overturn the result following Mugabe’s “doctoring” of the judiciary.
Speaking on the eve of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers’ gathering in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, last Thursday, Mugabe’s representative George Charamba revealed the goal of the current diplomatic offensive when he said “a new day” depended on Britain “accepting that the land issue is the problem and that Britain and Zimbabwe have the responsibility to resolve it”.
British sources reject Charamba’s claim the issue is bilateral, but “about Zimbabwe and the people of Zimbabwe, the Southern African region, then Africa, then the international community”.
With the rand crashing to all-time lows on failing economic confidence in the region, a “task force” of Zimbabwe’s neighbours was set up at the summit in Malawi last month of the 14 nation SADC.
Zimbabwe sources depict the group as friends on Mugabe’s side, aiming to “mediate” between him and Tony Blair’s government to end a campaign of economic and political destabilisation, aimed at derailing land reform.
Some, such as Mugabe’s slavish admirer Sam Nujoma of Namibia and Congo ally Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, are likely to take this line here this week.
But even Bakili Muluzi of Malawi has deplored violence and lawnessness here, although himself under fire for rights abuses and for dubious commitment to the constitutional ban on extending his 10 years in power.
Mindful that many of Malawian descent will be among the 1,3-million Zimbabwean commercial farm workers now facing unemployment and homelessness, Muluzi said the task force had to prevent a “spill-over into the region” and disruption of agricultural production.