Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe will be invited to attend the second European Union-Africa summit in December in Lisbon, a Portuguese official said on Tuesday.
Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with some backing in Europe, has indicated neither he nor any other senior minister will attend the summit if the Zimbabwean leader does.
”Everyone will receive the same invitation,” Pedro Courela, adviser to Portugal Secretary of State for Cooperation Joao Gomes Cravinho, told Agence France-Presse when asked whether Zimbabwe was included.
Courela said the invitations would be issued ”in the next few days”. Portugal’s Foreign Minister, Luis Amado, has said the guest list will be completed by the end of this month.
Courela was speaking by telephone on his way to the Ghanaian capital, Accra, ahead of a bilateral meeting between Portugal, which holds the rotating EU presidency and Ghana, which has the African Union presidency.
The meeting will be given over to checking the final draft of the summit agenda, Courela said.
The bilateral talks will be followed on Wednesday by a meeting of AU and EU foreign ministers, while other officials from both continents have been meeting in Accra since Monday.
Before the EU officials arrived, AU foreign ministers met on Saturday and Sunday, also in Accra, source said.
The row between Britain and Zimbabwe had led to some doubt as to whether the two-day Lisbon summit would go ahead. Dutch Foreign Ministry official Bart Rijs on Tuesday said Mugabe’s presence would ”not be totally desirable”.
But European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said earlier this month that the summit should not be derailed by a row between London and Harare over Mugabe’s rights record and polls his party is said to have rigged.
This long-standing dispute also concerns Mugabe’s land policy under which white-owned farmland was expropriated and given to black Zimbabwe, but Zimbabwe says Britain, the former colonial power, has reneged on a deal to help fund that scheme and lashes out at double standards.
The issues both EU and African leaders expect to feature on the summit’s agenda include climate change and migration, both legal and illegal, as well as China’s growing involvement in Africa.
Tuesday’s statement from The Netherlands was unclear on what action it would take if Mugabe showed up — which he is determined to do in spite of a European travel ban — but spokesperson Rijs said that ”if a representative from Zimbabwe” is present, the EU should take up human rights with that person at length. — AFP
