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| Africa Subsaharan |
| African Leaders Press Mugabe |
| 2008-06-25 |
| Influential leaders in South Africa and Senegal on Tuesday joined the global condemnation of Zimbabwe's lethal political violence and called on President Robert Mugabe to cancel Friday's election on grounds it would not reflect the free will of voters. At campaign stops Tuesday, Mugabe vowed to go forward with the runoff vote even though his only rival, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, has dropped out of the race at the demand of supporters terrorized by months of killings, beatings, arrests, torture and kidnappings. As Jacob Zuma, the head of South Africa's ruling party, and Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade expressed rising concern, Mugabe mocked Tsvangirai's decision to boycott the vote and take refuge in the Dutch Embassy. Tsvangirai's withdrawal has intensified the criticism of Mugabe and his determination to cling to power after 28 years despite sharply declining popularity and an economy that has gone from terrible to cataclysmic in recent months. A single U.S. dollar is now worth 14 billion Zimbabwean dollars on the black market, pushing an ever-growing number of people into poverty and hunger. As several regional leaders prepared to meet Wednesday in Swaziland for a summit on Zimbabwe, Zuma said the situation in the country was "out of control," according to news reports. His African National Congress issued a sharply worded statement calling for Friday's election to be canceled in favor of an urgent new round of negotiations between Mugabe and the opposition. The statement went far beyond the comments made previously by South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has been widely criticized for treating Mugabe with excessive deference. It accused the government of "riding roughshod" over the opposition. "The ugly incidents and scenes that have been visited on the people of Zimbabwe persuade us that a run-off Presidential election offers no solution to Zimbabwe's crisis," the statement said. "The very legitimacy of the run-off has already been severely compromised by the actions of both ZANU (PF) militants and those of state officials who do not even conceal their partiality in favor of the governing party." The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, is Mugabe's party. The statement, issued a day after a tough U.N. Security Council statement about Zimbabwe, also rejected suggestions of outside intervention, saying that the Zimbabwean people must solve the crisis on their own. "Any attempts by outside players to impose regime change will merely deepen the crisis," it said, going on to list injustices of British colonial rule. Major international powers, however outraged by the recent wave of torture, beatings, arrests and killings, have few obvious tools for ejecting a ruling group that controls every important lever of power in Zimbabwean society. Many Zimbabweans are hoping for decisive intervention from the Southern African Development Community, the region's most important intergovernmental group. Its members have grown increasingly critical of Mugabe -- once a nearly universally revered leader of African liberation -- since March 2007, when Tsvangirai was arrested and viciously beaten along with 50 other party activists. "They are inching toward a more proactive resolution of the crisis," said Jonathon Moyo, a former information minister in Mugabe's government who is now an independent member of parliament loosely aligned with the opposition. "They can persuade the Zimbabwean government to take a certain course of action. They are the only ones who can do that." |
| Posted by:Pappy |