Zimbabwe’s government newspaper offered a chilly, racially tinged welcome on Tuesday to the new United States envoy.
In his column in the government mouthpiece Herald, political editor Caesar Zvayi said James McGee had criticised Zimbabwe’s democratic and human rights record in statements to the US Senate before his arrival and, as an appointee of US President George Bush, was likely ”to turn out to be the house Negro”. McGee is black.
McGee, who began his assignment in Harare last week after formally presenting his diplomatic credentials to President Robert Mugabe, declined to respond to the state newspaper’s remarks.
Though ”one of our own, at least as far as skin colour is concerned”, McGee was a Vietnam veteran who earned three flying medals for ”bombing hapless villagers” there, Zvayi wrote.
But ”Zimbabwe welcomes the Son of McGee and hopes he will not shame the ancestors in whose loins he crossed the Atlantic to his adopted home,” Zvayi continued.
During his Senate confirmation hearings in September, McGee said Zimbabwe was ”suffering under authoritarian misrule”, and said he would work for peaceful change.
”Abandoning the people of Zimbabwe to the worst effects of their government’s misrule is not in America’s interests,” he said.
McGee’s predecessor, Christopher Dell, also had been a sharp criticof Mugabe’s government.
In a farewell interview before taking up a post in Afghanistan after three years in Zimbabwe, Dell told an independent newspaper that the government was ”doing regime change to itself” through economic mismanagement.
Mugabe to attend summit
Meanwhile, Mugabe will attend a European Union-Africa summit in December in Lisbon, a spokesperson said on Tuesday, triggering a boycott of the meeting by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
”We got the invitation last week and we are going,” George Charamba, Mugabe’s spokesperson, told Reuters in Mozambique.
Brown told reporters in London nothing will be gained from dialogue between Britain and Mugabe and that the Zimbabwean leader must ”take full responsibility” for the collapse of his country’s economy and society.
”We will not be prepared to sit down at the same table as Mugabe,” Brown said.
Charamba, Mugabe’s spokesperson dismissed Britain’s objections, saying: ”The British fear a handshake. We can’t expect timid characters to be where men are.”
The dispute between cast a shadow on the first meeting between the continents’ leaders in seven years.
Previous EU-Africa efforts to meet have foundered over whether Mugabe, accused by the West of widespread human rights violations but who Africa sees as an independence hero, should be invited.
Pressed by rising competition from China in Africa, the EU is determined that this year’s summit on December 8 to 9 should take place, in part to solidify its position as Africa’s largest trading partner.
A spokesperson for Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said he would fly to Zimbabwe on Wednesday to meet Mugabe to try to resolve the dispute between Harare and London.
”President Wade’s visit is in the framework of the Lisbon summit because in order for the summit to be a success, it is necessary for everyone to be there,” presidential spokeswoman Fatou Tandian told Reuters in Dakar. – Reuters