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 |  Subject: Sth Africa: Idiot Statist, President Thabo Mbeki said Zimbabwe’s election impasse not “a crisis.”  Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:29 pm | |
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President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa on Saturday in Zambia said he would not call Zimbabwe’s election impasse “a crisis.”
LUSAKA, Zambia — South Africa’s president played down the roiling political situation in Zimbabwe after meeting Saturday with Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, an aging strongman whose government has refused to release two-week-old election results that may have handed him defeat.
Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president and Africa’s point man for defusing the Zimbabwe crisis, spoke as an emergency meeting of presidents from across southern Africa began here, and they seemed likely to undercut any regional effort to intervene as Zimbabwe slips deeper into political and economic chaos.
“I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis,” Mr. Mbeki told reporters in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, after meeting with Mr. Mugabe, Reuters reported. “It’s a normal electoral process in Zimbabwe.”
Speaking at the opening of the summit meeting, Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, struck a more urgent tone, declaring that Zimbabwe’s neighbors could “no longer stand by and do nothing when one of its members is experiencing political and economic difficulties.”
Voters in Zimbabwe went to the polls on March 29, but electoral officials have not made the results of the presidential election public. Mr. Mugabe faced the toughest challenge yet to his 28-year rule from the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and he is believed to have fallen well short of victory, independent monitors said.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the main opposition candidate, is attending the summit meeting in Zambia. His party has gone to court to try to compel the electoral commission to release the election results and has rejected calls from Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, for a runoff, arguing that Mr. Tsvangirai won outright.
Opposition party leaders say that as the standoff wears on the violence against their supporters has risen as the government has cracked down on dissent, with hundreds of party members being arrested amid widespread intimidation.
Zimbabwe’s people are already suffering from hyperinflation of more than 100,000 percent, and prices of basic goods have climbed higher still. Essential items like bread and soap have all but disappeared from many shops, according to news reports.
The government has banned political rallies, while the opposition called for a general strike.
Mr. Mugabe told reporters in Harare that he did not plan to attend the summit meeting in Lusaka but would send envoys, an apparent snub to Mr. Mwanawasa, who leads the regional bloc and once compared Zimbabwe to a sinking ship.
But if history is a guide, the summit meeting was unlikely to produce concrete results even before Mr. Mbeki’s comments. The South African trade bloc’s on-again, off-again efforts to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis, which simmered for years before boiling over in this year’s election, have thus far borne little fruit. Mr. Mbeki has advocated a policy of “quiet diplomacy” on Zimbabwe, and in the clubby world of African heads of state, few have dared to be even mildly critical of the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe. Despite his problems at home, he remains a potent symbol of African liberation.
Africa’s weak regional blocs and the slow-footed African Union have struggled to resolve recent major crises, like the election violence in Kenya, which was ultimately mediated by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, or the civil war in Ivory Coast. That ended with the mediation of Burkina Faso after efforts by the West African regional trade group, the African Union and the United Nations failed.
Mr. Mugabe appeared defiant as he spoke to reporters after his meeting with Mr. Mbeki. He dismissed criticism from Western countries, telling reporters in Harare that one of his harshest critics, Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, was “a little tiny dot on this planet,” Reuters reported.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/world/africa/13zimbabwe.html?ref=world |
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