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US envoy defies Zimbabwe order to keep quiet
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - The US ambassador to Harare defied expulsion threats by launching a fresh attack Tuesday on Robert Mugabe, deriding the veteran Zimbabwean president as a despotic dictator. Christopher Dell denied Washington was actively seeking regime change or financing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) but warned Mugabe had boxed himself into a corner and was running out of options. "The fact is that the man is in a corner and he knows it," Dell told AFP in an interview in Johannesburg. "He has governed Zimbabwe for 26 years with a combination of repression and patronage. As the economy crumbles the ability to use these things disappear. He has nothing to steal and give away. What we are really looking at is a failing regime that is increasingly wobbly. Every time he is in a corner he tries to radicalise the situation further to regain a tactical advantage." Dell's comments came after he walked out of a meeting in Harare on Monday night when Zimbabwe's Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi said Zimbabwe would "not tolerate interference in our affairs." Mugabe himself warned last week that diplomats "must behave properly or else we kick them out of our country" in response to a firestorm of criticism over the arrest and subsequent assault of MDC leaders. The Zimbabwean president has consistently accused Washington of funding the MDC and of trying to topple his regime, which has been described by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as an "outpost of tyranny." "This is a typical reaction of a despot dictator," said Dell, who was en route to a long-standing appointment in London, insisting that "The US does not provide direct support to political parties in Zimbabwe or elsewhere." The charge that the United States is seeking to topple Mugabe was repeated on Tuesday by Zimbabwe's ambassador to the United Nations, Machivenyika Mapuranga, as he explained that the CNN and BBC television networks had been barred from the southern African country. The ban against "clearly hostile" networks would stay in place "until the opposition in (Zimbabwe) has renounced violence and until the British and Americans abandon their policy of regime change," he told CNN. "They espouse the regime change agenda of the United States government ... We know your agenda is not a noble one," he added. During his stopover in Johannesburg, Dell also criticised the South African government's policy of "quiet diplomacy" towards its northern neighbour where inflation now stands at 1,730 percent and unemployment at 80 percent. "I think the moment has come to realise the policy of quiet diplomacy has not produced results," said the envoy. "It has not changed Robert Mugabe's behaviour in any way. The time is right to intensify engagement and to get more directly involved with the Zimbabwean government." Posted by: tu3031 2007-03-20 |
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