Zimbabwe says an invitation to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is no longer valid following reports that Annan might use the visit to press President Robert Mugabe to step down after more than two decades in power.
”Zimbabwe is not a UN issue,” Mugabe spokesperson George Charamba was quoted as saying in state media on Thursday, a day after the leaders of Britain and South Africa said Annan’s intervention was the best chance for solving Zimbabwe’s economic and political crisis.
Following talks in London with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, South African President Thabo Mbeki told reporters Annan had indicated in talks with him earlier this year that he would travel to Zimbabwe for direct talks with Mugabe, and was expected to propose a package of aid in return for an assurance that Mugabe would hand over leadership. Neither he nor Blair would elaborate.
Mugabe has led Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980.
In New York, UN Undersecretary General Ibrahim Gambari said the UN has not received ”any official word from the government” of Zimbabwe that the invitation has been withdrawn.
”There is no action … on our part of the UN on the issue of the stepping down of President Mugabe,” Gambari said in an interview with Associated Press television news.
Annan had said last year that he would visit Zimbabwe at Mugabe’s invitation. But no date has been set and UN official have indicated planning the agenda and goals of such a visit is sensitive and difficult.
Charamba said Mugabe had invited Annan to see for himself the outcome of a slum-clearance operation that UN humanitarian officials condemned, estimating that at least 700 000 people were left homeless or without livelihoods in the impoverished nation in May and June 2005.
Gambari, who heads the political affairs department at the UN, said he is working with Zimbabwe’s foreign minister ”on how best to prepare for a positive visit by the secretary general to Zimbabwe, which would help advance this process of helping the people of Zimbabwe because they are the ones suffering the most now”.
”What we are doing under the leadership and very active role of the secretary general is to engage with the government of Zimbabwe to address the humanitarian challenges [and] the economic situation, which is quite difficult,” Gambari said.
Next week, he said, the UN resident coordinator in Zimbabwe will be coming to New York to discuss what is happening on the ground and what can be done to help.
Charamba said the slum-clearance operation had been followed by a re-housing programme for the displaced ”thereby removing the purpose of the invitation”, making it ”stale” and ”fall away”.
”That is known to the UN. The situation has changed,” he said.
Mbeki has called for constructive engagement with Zimbabwe, while Blair has been a harsh and outspoken critic of Mugabe.
Charamba said Britain and the United States were trying to use the UN to further what he called their own ”narrow foreign-policy goals”.
Western development aid, investment and loans have dried up in political and economic turmoil following Mugabe’s campaign, begun in 2000, to seize farms from whites and transfer the land to blacks. Zimbabwe’s once-healthy, agriculture-based economy has collapsed since the seizures began and Mugabe has grown increasingly autocratic.
Western nations, protesting a breakdown in law and order, sweeping media and security curbs and deteriorating democratic and human rights, have demanded reforms that analysts said were unlikely unless Mugabe left office.
The government insisted last year’s so-called urban renewal drive known, as Operation Murambatsvina — or Clean Out Trash in the local Shona language — flushed out criminals and illegal black-market traders whose activities were fuelling record inflation.
Humanitarian organisations and government critics said the demolitions of tens of thousands of homes, shacks and market stalls, accompanied by mass arrests and the seizure and destruction of private possessions, were aimed at dispersing support for the political opposition among urban poor.
Last month, Mugabe acknowledged that only about 4 000 basic housing units were completed in the government’s re-housing programme.
Zimbabwe is reeling from inflation of 1 043% — the highest in the world — and acute shortages of food, gasoline and imports, along with an HIV/Aids epidemic that is killing at least 3 000 people a week.
The UN food agency distributed emergency food aid to about one fourth of the 12,5-million population last month and said many people across the country were surviving on one meal or less a day. — Sapa-AP