Ghana Foreign Minister Nana Akufo-Addo, whose country heads the African Union, insisted on Tuesday that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe should be invited to a European Union-Africa summit in December.
”We can’t have a situation where people pick and choose which Africans they deal with when they deal with Africa on a continental basis,” he told a news conference.
The second EU-Africa summit, which has been repeatedly postponed, is scheduled to finally take place in Lisbon in December. But the question of whether Mugabe should attend still threatens to derail it.
The EU is concerned about the deteriorating political situation in Zimbabwe where Mugabe has intensified a crackdown on the opposition.
Mugabe and his entourage are banned from travelling to Europe under sanctions imposed by the EU on Zimbabwe since 2002 for human rights violations.
The summit was originally to have taken place in April 2003.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told a joint news conference that the summit should not be held hostage to the problem. ”December is a long time from today,” he said.
South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on Monday denounced the EU’s attitude.
”It is too important a relationship to be help at ransom by one issue,” he said.
The EU and the AU on Tuesday still agreed on the main lines of a ”common strategy”, including on African development, migration, climate change and energy security. — Sapa-AFP