The pressure on Robert Mugabe is gathering force following last week’s Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit with Thabo Mbeki’s appointed team of officials, from the presidency and foreign affairs, who are talking to the main protagonists in the Zimbabwean crisis.
The severity of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe has increased in the past three years, according to a recently released Human Rights Watch report. State security institutions are directly involved in the violations — a new development since 2000, when militias and war veterans were mainly responsible.
Although Zimbabwe is undergoing turbulent times not seen since the bloody 2002 presidential elections, South Africa and other regional states have responded in muted tones at a time when Australia is contemplating evacuating about 700 of its citizens from the strife-torn country.
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/ 27 February 2007
In its seventh consecutive year of economic recession, Robert Mugabe’s stranglehold on power is atrophying in a way that was unimaginable a year ago. The Franco-African summit in Cannes went ahead recently without Mugabe after the French bowed to pressure from Britain to rescind their invitation to the Zimbabwean head of state.