World and regional leaders joined forces on Wednesday calling on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to stop intimidating opponents ahead of his country’s presidential run-off vote.
”It is time for the leaders of Africa to say to President Mugabe that the people of Zimbabwe deserve a free and fair election, that you cannot intimidate opponents, you cannot put opponents in jail,” United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters.
Rice said she hoped to ”bring some international attention” to Zimbabwe when she and her counterpart from Burkina Faso co-chair ”roundtable” talks on Thursday at the UN Security Council.
”This is, from our point of view, a matter for the Security Council of the United Nations to deal with,” Rice told reporters during a meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Raila Odinga of Kenya.
Odinga called for an international peacekeeping force to be deployed in Zimbabwe to ensure proper elections are held.
”What we need in Zimbabwe is actually an international peacekeeping force so that … proper elections can be held,” Odinga said.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon also expressed his ”profound alarm” over the situation in Zimbabwe ahead of the June 27 vote at an informal session of the UN General Assembly, his spokesperson said in New York.
”The current violence, intimidation and arrest of opposition leaders are not conducive to credible elections,” spokesperson Michele Montas quoted him as saying.
”Should these conditions continue to prevail, the legitimacy of the election outcomes would be in question,” Ban added.
Ahead of the run-off against Mugabe, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai, has been repeatedly detained. And Tendai Biti, the MDC’s number two, on Wednesday appeared in court facing a treason charge. But a judge suspended the case until Thursday.
The opposition has called Biti’s arrest part of a campaign of harassment, intimidation and violence.
Embarrassment
In London, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Zimbabwe was being run by a ”criminal cabal” and that a presidential election held now could not be free and fair.
”Zimbabwe remains an eyesore on the African continent,” Kenya’s Odinga told reporters in Washington.
”It’s a big embarrassment that a leader can say on the eve of elections that he’s not willing to hand over power” to an opponent, Odinga added.
In a first round of elections on March 29, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party lost its majority in Parliament — for the first time since independence in 1980 — to the MDC, the main opposition movement.
Tsvangirai also beat Mugabe in the first round, but election officials said he fell short of an outright majority and must face Mugabe in the run-off.
In Harare a senior UN official, Haile Menkerios, on Wednesday met with Tsvangirai, who said he was concerned about pre-election violence, a party spokesperson said.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, appointed to mediate Zimbabwe’s crisis by the 14-nation Southern African Development Community, arrived in Zimbabwe on Wednesday to meet Mugabe.
Mbeki, who first met with Tsvangirai, said last week that levels of violence in Zimbabwe were a cause for ”serious concern and should be addressed with all urgency”.
But his reluctance to publicly criticise Mugabe has infuriated Tsvangirai, who has called for him to be stripped of his role as mediator.
Former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano, however, criticised Europe and the US for fixating on Mugabe, saying in an interview published on Wednesday it was more important to rescue the country’s crippled economy.
”Africans and the rest of the world must try to ensure that the election takes place peacefully and properly and appeal to the parties to respect the outcome,” Chissano told the German daily, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
”Then a new start must be made to improve the economic situation. For me it is not important whether Mugabe steps down but whether there is a new start.” — AFP
