Johannesburg — LEADERS of the top industrialised nations are expected to ratchet up pressure on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe - and President Thabo Mbeki, mediator in that country's protracted political crisis - at a three-day Group of Eight (G-8) meeting starting in Japan today.
Mbeki left for the Japanese resort village of Toyako yesterday after another failed mediation initiative in Zimbabwe. He is among the leaders of several developing countries attending the G-8 summit.
Mbeki flew hurriedly to Harare on Saturday for a face-to-face meeting between Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai, widely considered to be the rightful winner of recent presidential elections.
But Tsvangirai did not arrive, citing the non-neutral venue and continued failure to recognise him as winner of the disputed March 29 presidential poll.
Western governments refuse to recognise Mugabe as head of state. The European Union has said Tsvangirai must lead any national unity administration.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the G-8 leaders would discuss how to toughen sanctions on Zimbabwe, an idea opposed by SA in the United Nations Security Council.
"I hope that we will also get support from our African colleagues here," Merkel said, in a sign of the pressure likely to be put on Mbeki.
Dennis Wilder, senior director for Asian affairs at the US National Security Council, told reporters on Air Force One on the way to Japan that the G-8 would "strongly condemn what Mugabe has done" and "strongly question the legitimacy of his government".
The African Union (AU) called for a power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe after a summit in Egypt last week. Tsvangirai rejected the proposal, saying it would not help end violence or recognise the MDC's March 29 victory.
Pressure on SA continued to mount at home yesterday, too, with visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband saying it was "imperative" to find a solution to the worsening crisis in Zimbabwe.
After meeting about 2000 refugees at a centre in Johannesburg, Miliband said Britain would redouble its efforts to ensure that Mugabe's regime was not seen as "a legitimate representation of the will of the people of Zimbabwe".
Miliband called for the international community to back US-proposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, to be tabled in coming days at the security council.
The British minister arrived in SA yesterday for talks with Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma under the auspices of the SA-UK Bilateral Forum.
Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad on Friday rejected the draft security council resolution calling for mandatory sanctions to be applied to Mugabe and the senior leadership of Zanu (PF).
Despite reports of continuing violence against MDC supporters, Pahad insisted that the recent AU summit came to that conclusion based on a concrete understanding of the realities on the ground.
"Any other interventions that go against the gist of what the AU summit resolution presents, I believe, will not be of assistance.
"As the AU summit resolution says, we call on all other organisations and the international community to not do anything that will jeopardise what the Southern African Development Community (SADC) facilitation, on behalf of the African continent, is trying to achieve," Pahad said.
Mbeki is the SADC's facilitator.
"We therefore hope that those who have proposed this draft will seriously consider what the summit decisions were and allow Africans to solve Africa's problems," Pahad said.
The AU resolution, while expressing grave concern , stopped short of refusing to recognise the results of Mugabe's June 27 one-candidate runoff election, but did not endorse Mugabe maintaining the status quo.
With Reuters, Wyndham Hartley
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Another Anglo progressive view below:
'Zimbabwe shows Africa is still in the despots' grip", said the headline in the London Observer over an article by Keith Richburg.
"Thank God that I am an American," writes this former foreign editor of the Washington Post.
An African-American, Richburg says he is very pleased he is not an African.
He reminds me of middle-class black Americans I met when I first travelled in Africa. They were usually tourists looking for their roots and in their behaviour, reactions and ignorance, they demonstrated how quintessentially American they were. For them, Africa was another planet.
A decade ago, writes Richburg, Zimbabwe was "a humming economy" with "impressive growth".
No, it was not. In 1998 Zimbabwe was a profoundly unequal society up to its ears in debt, with the International Monetary Fund waging war on its economy, waving off investors and freezing loans.
Moving his gaze north, Richburg describes Somalia as a "failed state" -- a term Western governments like to use -- while saying nothing about how this oil-rich country was manipulated and abused by Washington during the Cold War.
He mentions only in passing the role of the US and the "international community" as "enablers" in backing Ethiopia's current bloody invasion of Somalia.
It is not surprising he tells us his hero is Barack Obama who, far from defying "conventional wisdom about race in America", as Richburg credits him, almost every day falls in with conventional, white corporate wisdom.
Richburg's view of Africa is from the same conventional, white corporate wisdom. That Mugabe is an appalling tyrant is beyond all doubt; yet there is a subtext to the overly enthusiastic condemnation of him by the "international community", notably in Europe. "Unacceptable!" says British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, having personally distinguished the campaign to morally rehabilitate the concept of empire.
"The days of Britain having to apologise for the British Empire are over," said Brown not long ago.
"We should celebrate." And what better way to celebrate than with highly selective condemnation of uppity despots like Mugabe while fawning before equally awful despots such as the Saudi Royal family?
If nothing else, Mugabe has provided retrospective justification for the glory days. And perhaps his greatest crime is having slipped the leash. After all, both despots and democrats in Africa provide an essential service, or as Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, "the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged. [They are] quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie's business agent." Those who refuse the role of business agent have often paid with their lives: from Patrice Lumumba to Amilcar Cabral, Ken Saro-Wiwa to Chris Hani.
The wanton underdevelopment of Africa hardly makes headlines, yet its victims outnumber those of Mugabe many times over.
Once known as neo-colonialism, it began more than half a century ago with the rise of European federalism. "It can be argued," wrote Dan Kashagama of the African Unification Front, "that the control of Africa was central to the creation of the EU and its forerunners
"The six founder members of the EU could not maintain their economies without "association" with the colonial territories In other words, Africa would never be allowed to have democratic economic choices Europe would decide what kind of economy Africans were to build. Africa was to supply Europe's needs "
I recommend a succinct analysis by Africa's Roman Catholic bishops of why 300-million Africans live on less than a dollar a day.
Their list is as follows: "huge crippling debts" mostly to Europe; an "iniquitous" and "atrociously immoral" system that keeps prices for African raw materials artificially low while those for rich-world exports continue to rise; the desecration of the African environment by Western corporations; the withholding by European banks of wealth looted by deposed and dead dictators; colonial interventions by European powers on the side of armed factions; and a devastating arms trade.
While the British government claims it leads the world in the "fight against poverty" it is the major arms merchant to 10 out of 14 conflict-racked African countries.
In South Africa, the Mbeki government has been suckered by British arms companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17-million each, "by far the most expensive option", according to a House of Commons report.
Brown, together with his EU partners, is currently demanding free trade deals that will destroy whole African industries, such as Ghana's once thriving tomato canning industry. "Europe," says Gyekye Tanoh of the Third World Network in Accra, "is gaining 80% of our markets in exchange for what is effectively 2% of theirs."
None of this excuses the outrages of Mugabe. But look beyond the West's whipping boy and mark the enduring outrage of an imperial past that remains a war against Africa that Africans must win.
Why is Thabo Mbeki so soft on Mugabe? Is it simply loyalty to a past of "joint struggle", as has been suggested? Here is a clue.
In September 2005, a study submitted to Parliament in Cape Town compared the treatment of landless black farmers under apartheid and their treatment today.
During the final decade of apartheid, 737 000 people were evicted from white-owned farmland. In the first decade of democracy, 942 000 were evicted. About half of those forcibly removed were children and about a third were women.
A law intended to protect these people and put an end to peonage, the Security of Tenure Act was enacted by the Mandela government in 1997. That year, Nelson Mandela told me: "We have done something revolutionary, for which we have received no credit at all.
There is no country where labour tenants have been given the security we have given them where a farmer cannot just dismiss them."
The law proved a sham. Most evictions never reached the courts and bitterness among black farm workers has grown inexorably and so too has the whole question of land, actual and symbolic. When the ANC came to power in 1994, the "priority" of land restitution was allocated 0,3% of the national budget. By 2005, it was still less than 1%.
When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki's second term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe's dictator a standing ovation. The embarrassment and message for Mbeki was like a presence.
"This was probably less an endorsement for Mugabe's despotism," noted the writer Bryan Rostron, "than a symbolic expression of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just come-uppance."
It was also a warning.
John Pilger is the author of several books and a world renowned journalist and documentary filmmaker. Visit his website
FANTASTIC article Phiri, thanks for sharing.
I too concur. Not to be unkind and not that it matters much, but I do feel that Phiri's article is not entirely his own. I have read many of Phiri's posts and the sentence formations and command of written English in this particular post is different. This is meant to be a constructive criticism and not a put down to Phiri.
pushing for sanction against zimbabwe or Mugabe?this question need to be table at the G8 summitt.The African leaders attending this submitt should define this sanction clearly to other participant and those pushing for sanctions.The masses in zimbabwe suffers this so call sanctions and not those who lives in the government palace,sanction should be consider inhuman ,hatred,racism and inhuman right.sanction of zimbabwe affects the ordinary citizen,it affects the less previledge,affects the disable,affects the poor .it does not pinch or have impact on the dictator and the imbecile that sorrounded the government.If this so called developed countries,super power and the United Nations would be fair to safe our diminishing world sanction should not be prescribe on the continent of Africa,for the sake of humanity. If the west would mediate fairly in Africa regional crisis without prejudice and selfish interest; remains doubtful to the African`s at large for reasons best known to me and you. we all know the past dishonesty ,betrayal,cheat,blindfolded,disrespect,extortion and many more evil that was done to the land of our ancestors.to this reasons many African doubtful of the west sincere intervention into the region problem,for example take a look at what happened in Liberia,sierra leone,sudan . Sanction should not be consider a tools of punishment for the continent of Africa.please G8 members we all are human understand this ,your sanction is pronouncement of death upon the ordinary people of Zimbabwe,define your sanction clearly .mediation in fairness implement weapon sanction both in small arms and at large,not economy sanction.practice what you preach.
Um......typsytypsy....there aren't any African countries in the G8. So no African participants.
Zimbabwe is a failed state it isn't even in the D8.
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