9 November 2008
Johannesburg — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza arrived in Johannesburg on Sunday morning to take part in an extraordinary summit of heads of state and government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), that will be dominated by the crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in Zimbabwe.
Originally the summit was called because a summit of the SADC Organ for Political, Defence and Security Cooperation, held in Harare on 27-28 October, failed to break the deadlock between the ruling ZANU-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which won the March elections, over the composition of a new government.
However, since then an offensive by rebel troops led by Gen Laurent Nkunda has threatened to take the city of Goma in the eastern DRC. The Congolese authorities accuse Rwanda of backing Nkunda, which the Rwandan government strongly denies. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the fighting and are fleeing over the border or into the forests.
United Nations officials have accused both sides in the current conflict of committing war crimes. The head of the UN mission in the DRC (MONUC), Alan Doss, warned on Saturday that the deliberate killing of civilians could never be accepted. 'We condemn them, we deplore them, and we remind the different groups involved that international law is very clear on this - these are war crimes that we cannot tolerate,' he said.
The summit is preceded by a meeting of the Defence and Security troika, of which Swazi King Mswati III is the chair, and Guebuza the deputy chair. The third member is the troika's outgoing chairperson, Angola President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
This meeting will give its opinion on the recommendations from the troika's ministerial committee which met in Maputo on Wednesday.
At the Wednesday meeting, participants urged Zimbabwe and Botswana to settle their differences. Botswanan President Ian Khama has been the most outspoken critic in the region of the violence unleashed by ZANU-PF which forced the MDC to withdraw from the second round of the Zimbabwean presidential election.
He has called for new elections in Zimbabwe under international supervision. In response, at the Wednesday meeting the Zimbabwean delegation claimed that Botswana was training MDC youth brigades in order to destabilize Zimbabwe. The Botswanan Defence Ministry issued a statement flatly denying such claims, and the troika wanted to see some evidence for the Zimbabwean allegations.
The South African government is now losing patience with its Zimbabwean neighbours. South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, who will chair the summit, warned that the quarrel over forming a new government is 'a luxury they really can least afford'.
'They should be striving to form one government for the people of Zimbabwe so that they can really begin to tackle the challenges of economic recovery and political stability,' he said.
But ZANU-PF seems entirely uninterested in reaching an agreement at the summit. The front page of Saturday issue of "The Herald", a mouthpiece for ZANU propaganda, carried a claim that the supposed military training of MDC "militias" in "a neighbouring country" also involved "British military instructors".
The unnamed "Herald" source passing on this disinformation declined to name the "neighbouring counry" but the Botwanan authorities themselves have made clear that the claim refers to them.
Clearly ZANU-PF wants to divert the summit into the fantasy allegations against Botswana, rather than into the ZANU refusal to implement the power-sharing agreement of 15 September.
The "Herald" source used the Botswana claim as an excuse not to allow the MDC to appoint the Minister of Home Affairs. 'How can the nation's security be guaranteed if the people who are in charge of the police force, immigration and the Registrar-General's Office are training militias? It does not make sense,' the source, described merely as "an insider" said.
There are a number of undoubted militias in the country described as "war veterans" or "youth brigades". They happen to be run, not by the MDC, but by ZANU-PF.
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