Hoping to bridge divisions over Zimbabwe, a panel of Commonwealth leaders was debating how best to re-engage President Robert Mugabe and decide whether the suspension against him should be lifted.
A six-nation committee, which spent hours locked in discussions on Saturday, was drafting recommendations it hoped to present to other Commonwealth heads of government.
But Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he and fellow panelists were still divided over Zimbabwe and suggested they may need more time to reach an agreement.
”It is a difficult issue as there are some strongly divergent views,” Howard said. ”I think we have made some progress but I do not want to get people too elevated in their expectations.”
The bloc, whose nations represent one-third of the world’s six-billion people, suspended Zimbabwe last year, after Mugabe was widely accused of using force and fraud to win re-election to the presidency.
Debate over whether to continue the suspension has dominated the 52-nation summit in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and some other Pacific nations are adamant on maintaining Zimbabwe’s suspension until he embraces democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law.
Several African and other developing nations are insisting that dialogue — not isolation — will bring reforms in Zimbabwe, and want the suspension lifted.
Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mozambique and South Africa were charged with resolving the issue, so that other leaders could focus on global problems: combating terrorism, disease and boosting free trade.
Canadian officials said Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, who chaired the meeting, had begun drafting a text of their recommendations. The committee was meeting again on Sunday to decide whether its members could agree on a text to present to other leaders.
Recommendations are expected to focus on setting benchmarks for reforms by Mugabe, and a mechanism of surveillance to monitor his progress, but no official details have been released by the committee.
Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon has urged Mugabe to reconsider his threat to pull out of the bloc, saying leaders were seeking to re-engage with the troubled southern African nation.
Mugabe, banned from the Commonwealth and the summit, has repeatedly declared he might withdraw from the bloc if its four-day meeting ends without lifting the suspension.
In Zimbabwe, state radio reported that Mugabe’s ruling party had urged him on Saturday to make the break.
McKinnon said he hoped the committee would find ”the way forward, the blueprint for re-engagement with Zimbabwe,” without elaborating further.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s spokesperson, Remi Oyo, said the Nigerian leader wanted a ”quick solution to the problem”.
”The president is hoping for an amicable settlement of this issue and that Zimbabwe can get over its problems and get back to serving its people,” she said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a strong advocate of maintaining the suspension, is keen for the issue to be resolved before he leaves the summit and returns to Britain on Sunday afternoon.
It was unclear whether the committee would have agreed on a text by then. McKinnon suggested it will be difficult to continue the discussions beyond Sunday because Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was scheduled to leave on Sunday night. – Sapa-AP