The Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) decision to appoint President Thabo Mbeki as mediator in Zimbabwe was both lauded and ridiculed on Friday.
”The Inkatha Freedom Party [IFP] welcomes the SADC’s decision to call on President Thabo Mbeki to lead efforts to promote discussions between rival political parties in Zimbabwe,” IFP spokesperson Ben Skosana said in a statement.
The party had recently called for an honest broker, such as Mbeki, to organise all relevant factions in Zimbabwe to start negotiating.
”We are therefore extremely pleased that the IFP’s suggestions were echoed by SADC, and we hope to see constructive talks between Zanu-PF and [the opposition Movement for Democratic Change] MDC, so that democracy in one of the most troubled countries on the African continent can be restored,” Skosana said.
However, the Democratic Alliance’s Joe Seremane sounded a different note.
”Once again South Africa and the SADC have been taken hostage by President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF,” he said in another statement.
Instead of taking action on the massive human rights violations in Zimbabwe, the SADC leaders decided to call for a lowering of sanctions in what could possibly be interpreted as open support of the Mugabe regime.
The leaders at the summit should have called for smart sanctions against Mugabe, his wife and members of his government, such as a travel ban within the SADC, and the freezing of all their externally held assets.
This call should have been led by Mbeki, as an acknowledgement of the vicious poverty, deprivation and human rights abuses that the people of Zimbabwe were suffering as a direct result of the actions of Mugabe and his government’s policies, Seremane said.
”Calling on President Mbeki to be the mediator between Zanu-PF and the MDC is pointless.
”President Mbeki has already been called upon to be the point-man in negotiations in Zimbabwe, and he has achieved nothing.”
This was because Mbeki’s policy choices with regard to Zimbabwe were fundamentally flawed.
”If they were not flawed the situation there would have improved. It has not. The problem is the process, not the individuals running it.”
A further indictment of the SADC meeting was its utter failure to address, to even mention, the attacks on the democratically elected opposition party members, who were assaulted by government forces.
SADC’s statement that ”the extraordinary summit reaffirms their solidarity with the government and the people of Zimbabwe”, was highly revealing, because the people of Zimbabwe were effectively at war with their government; they were not one and the same.
”This suggests that the Zimbabwean government and its president behaved in a legitimate manner. This is totally unacceptable.”
History would severely judge all the leaders who showed solidarity with Mugabe and Zanu-PF at the expense of the basic human rights of ordinary Zimbabweans, Seremane said. — Sapa