President Thabo Mbeki has reaffirmed South Africa’s policy of constructive engagement towards Zimbabwe and again rejected calls to punish President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party.
”We are not going to act on the Zimbabwe question with a view to punishment… What we have got to do is to ensure that the situation in Zimbabwe changes,” he told MPs during parliamentary question time on Thursday.
Mbeki repeated that South Africa would work with the Zimbabwean government, the opposition, the business community and the Commercial Farmers Union to assist in changing the crisis-ridden country.
”That’s the policy and the position we will take. It’s the only position we will take.”
Referring to Foreign Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s recent visit to Zimbabwe, he said: ”We will continue to engage in Zimbabwe and push as hard as we can to produce results.”
However, it was perfectly clear that there were people within South Africa who had a different objective, Mbeki said.
”Other people think our task is to punish, to defeat, to crush Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF.”
Mbeki said the way to ensure human rights and democracy was not to crush, ”but to ensure that Zimbabwe gets onto a different path”.
He noted that many of those calling for the ”crushing” were putting the obligation on South Africa to do so.
”If they want to crush, I don’t know why they don’t do so themselves,” Mbeki said to the amusement of ANC MPs.
He repeated that some opposition parties’ attitudes towards Zimbabwe was based on ”the fear that things happening to white people might happen here”.
”That is the centre of the concern and the result is that major challenges happening on our continent, those people in our country do not want to address.
”It doesn’t matter how many Ivorians die. ‘Let’s talk about Zimbabwe’. Doesn’t matter who many millions of Sudanese die. ‘Let’s talk about Zimbabwe’,” Mbeki chided.
Pointing to the government benches, Mbeki said South Africa would not proceed to define Africa’s agenda on the basis of whether ”those people who sit there constitute a threat to white South Africa and to demonstrate that we are not such a threat then we have to do something about Mugabe”.
”What we have to do with Zimbabwe is to assist Zimbabwe to get out of its crisis … the economic, political and social crisis.”
He repeated that there were many things that were wrong with Zimbabwe and which South Africa did not agree with.
On the recent Commonwealth troika meeting in Abuja, he said Zimbabwe’s Commercial Farmers Union had approached South Africa’s High Commission to Harare ahead of the meeting and forwarded a memorandum in which it said sanctions were not the answer to the country’s ills. – Sapa