Britain has warned fellow European Union nations that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not attend a planned Europe-Africa summit if Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe does, diplomatic sources said on Saturday.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made London’s position clear on Friday during an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in the northern Portuguese town of Viana do Castelo.
”He told them that the PM would not be there if Mugabe goes,” a source close to the closed-door talks said.
Miliband contented himself on Saturday by saying: ”I don’t think anyone wants to be part of a media circus in December,” when the summit will be held in Lisbon.
”There is serious work to be done and that is what we are focussing on,” he said before joining his fellow foreign ministers for a group photo.
”I think we all want a successful summit, but we are also very, very concerned about the situation in Zimbabwe,” Miliband added, pointing out that the Zimbabwean currency had been devalued by 1 200% on Thursday.
A senior British official told Agence France-Presse that ”it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the British prime minister and other EU leaders will attend a summit at which Mugabe is present.”
He added that Zimbabwe should nevertheless be represented at the meeting.
While Africa as a whole and Zimbabwe in particular have serious issues to discuss, such as poverty, climate change and security ”none of them will be properly discussed if Mugabe rolls up and we have a Mugabe circus,” the British official said.
He added that there were precedents for such cases, such as Burma’s involvement in the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) despite a bar on prime minister Than Shwe attending.
An EU official said there could be some room for manoeuvre on the problem.
”You know how it goes, you send a generic invitation to everyone and hope that there will be some kind of transport problem … The Africans know very well that it is in their interests that this summit takes place”.
Portugal, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, has said that it has no intention of discriminating against Mugabe.
”It is not up to Portugal, current head of the EU, to invite some people rather than others,” Portugal’s Deputy Foreign Minister Joao Gomes Cravinho said at a Lusaka summit of Southern African leaders last month.
The 83-year-old Mugabe is officially barred from travelling to the 27 nations in the EU.
The issue has long hampered efforts to organise a second summit between the European Union and African states. The first was held in Cairo in 2000. – Sapa-AFP