With Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders having failed to grasp the nettle of the Zimbabwe crisis during their two-day summit in Luanda this week, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has urged the international community to step up diplomatic pressure on Harare.
MDC foreign affairs spokesperson Moses Mzila-Ndlovu said the international community should adopt further hard-hitting measures to isolate President Robert Mugabe’s regime and force it to reform.
He said European Union and United States smart sanctions against Harare officials should be rigorously enforced to galvanise Mugabe into action.
”It is high time the EU recognises that there can be no half measures in dealing with such a rogue regime as the one led by Mugabe,” he said. ”This, certainly, is a regime that does not understand the language of diplomacy, but the language of force.
Mzila-Ndlovu said the tougher measures would compel Mugabe to restore democratic legitimacy through a presidential election rerun and a return to the rule of law.
SADC officials also wrestled with an apparent refusal by the US to meet a Zimbabwean delegation at an annual forum later this year.
The US and the SADC meet each year to review development programmes and other issues.
But officials at the summit in Luanda said the US had informed SADC that it would not attend the forum this year if Zimbabwe was part of the SADC delegation. The forum was due to be held in Malawi next month.
Washington refused to recognise Mugabe’s re-election in March, citing widespread political violence and claims of vote fraud, and has slapped sanctions on Mugabe and his inner circle.
There as been a muted response from neighbouring African leaders to Mugabe’s increasingly repressive regime, blamed for human rights abuses and for exacerbating the effects of a regional drought that has left nearly 15-million people in six countries facing famine.
Since Mugabe two years ago began a controversial scheme of seizing white-owned farms for resettlement by blacks, agricultural production in Zimbabwe has plummeted, leaving a nation that once exported food to the region asking the United Nations’s World Food Programme for emergency aid.
Talks at the summit were expected to focus on the famine and on recent gains in the peace process in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano left Luanda early on Thursday to return to Maputo ahead of celebrations on Friday marking the 10th anniversary of the peace deal that ended 16 years of civil war in his country.
By midday Thursday the summit had broken up into bilateral meetings as officials worked to finalise a final declaration.
The 14 SADC nations are Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. — (c) Zimbabwe Independent 2002; Additional reporting by Sapa-AFP