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Zimbabwe crisis off agenda at regional summit
Tizoh Mosenyi, Reuters
August 16, 2005

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GABORONE (Reuters) - Southern African leaders meeting this week will not address Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis because it is not a "regional situation", officials said on Tuesday.

"There is no agenda on Zimbabwe. We discuss regional situations not individual countries," Prega Ramsamy, executive director of the 13-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), said ahead of the organisation's summit on Wednesday.

Zimbabwe was a major preoccupation at last year's summit in Mauritius, where SADC agreed groundbreaking election protocols -- even though the organisation denied the rules were being drawn up with Zimbabwe's March 2005 parliamentary polls in mind.

The run-up to this year's meeting has been marked by a gearing-up of diplomatic efforts to defuse a deep crisis in Zimbabwe as it faces a deepening financial crisis and international condemnation of its demolition of shantytowns.

The African Union, to which all SADC member states also belong, took a step towards a more interventionist policy on Zimbabwe last week when it confirmed it had asked former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano to mediate.

Chissano was mandated to mediate between Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), but Mugabe's acting Information Minister Chen Chimutengwende told the official Herald newspaper on Tuesday the MDC was "not worth negotiating with".

The MDC said in a statement that SADC had a "collective responsibility to act" to avoid having to address a worse situation next year.

"If this opportunity is squandered, then at next year's meeting SADC leaders may well be confronted with a crisis that has spiralled out of control," MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said.

"This would cast a dark shadow over the region's commitment to improving democratic governance," he added.

Botswana's president, Festus Mogae, who takes on SADC's revolving chairmanship on Wednesday, confirmed that the political situation in Zimbabwe was not on the agenda for the two-day heads of state meeting he is hosting in Gaborone.

Mogae told Reuters that Zimbabwe did not pose a problem to economic growth in the region, even though its problems have weakened the economy of his own country, which is historically closely linked to that of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe's critics blame seizures of white-owned farms for crippling commercial agriculture, and Zimbabwe now faces sky-high inflation and unemployment and shortages of fuel, foreign exchange and basic foodstuffs.

Mugabe in turn accuses former colonial power Britain of sabotaging the economy and manipulating the MDC in retribution for the seizure of white-owned farms.

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