Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was expected to address the United Nations General Assembly’s special session on children’s rights in New York on Friday, despite a travel ban imposed by the White House that forbids him to enter the United States. A State Department official said government lawyers were being consulted.
Mugabe is prohibited from entering the US under the targeted sanctions announced by President George W Bush in February. The decision to permit his presence at the UN reflects a longstanding policy towards world leaders who are otherwise persona non grata in the US.
Mugabe’s visit coincides with an announcement by the country’s finance minister that Zimbabwe’s crumbling economy, facing acute hard currency shortages, needs to immediately raise up to $30-million for urgent imports of food.
Food imports worth at least another $200-million need to be bought from as far as China and Brazil to stave off famine within the next year, Minister of Finance Simba Makoni said.
“We are looking for the money and when we find it we will put in purchase orders,” he said.
But Zimbabwe’s growing international isolation, following political violence tacitly endorsed by the government, appears to be hampering efforts to raise the money.
The food shortage in a country that was once considered a breadbasket for the region, has been blamed in part on the violence accompanied by Mugabe’s land reform programme to redistribute white-owned farms to landless blacks.
Makoni said to date the government had ordered and paid for about 230 000 tons of cornmeal – the country’s staple food – mainly from South Africa, at a cost of $3,5-million.
But South Africa, concerned about its own food reserves, has cut back on cornmeal exports. The cost of orders from Asia and South America are expected to far exceed the South African price of about $160 a ton.
Acknowledging the nation’s deepening economic crisis, Makoni said Zimbabwe required an additional 170 000 tons of grain immediately and another million tons over the next year.
But independent food security agencies have estimated the need to be much greater. The UN relief and recovery unit said the cash-strapped government would likely need to “mobilise” $345-million to feed the 13-million population in the coming year.
It said hopes that donors would bale the government out of the food crisis were thrown into doubt by the poor response to an appeal last September for emergency food aid for areas in Zimbabwe already affected by severe malnutrition and starvation.
- Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean police charged a columnist of the independent Daily News on Tuesday, bringing to eight the number of journalists arrested under harsh new media laws. Pius Wakatama is accused of publishing false information in a column critical of tacit government support for land seizures, his lawyer said.
Two Daily News reporters and Andrew Meldrum of The Guardian were ordered on Wednesday to return to court on May 22 to answer a charge of publishing false information.
Meldrum, The Daily Telegraph‘s Peta Thornycroft and Jan Raath, a correspondent for the Times, the South African Press Association and the German news agency DPA, this week applied to the country’s highest court to challenge the restrictions on press freedom.