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| author/source:News24 (SA) |
| published:Sat 11-Oct-2003 |
| posted on this site:Sun 12-Oct-2003 |
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| Article Type : News |
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| "You might call it quiet diplomacy ... but what it is is appeasement" |
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Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's African neighbours are appeasing the country's increasingly authoritarian President Robert Mugabe and prolonging his rule by pursuing an approach of so-called quiet diplomacy, a senior Zimbabwean opposition official said Saturday. Welshman Ncube, general-secretary of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said it was hard to understand why African states were taking a softer approach on Mugabe than Western powers and people from within the troubled country itself. "This is the bewildering part of the policy," Ncube told a forum on democracy and Zimbabwe at a Johannesburg hotel. "You might call it quiet diplomacy ... but what it is is appeasement." The approach, he said, "has had the unfortunate effect of actually prolonging the crisis."
President Thabo Mbeki has defended South Africa's policy on Zimbabwe. He says the best solution to the Zimbabwe crisis would be to bring Mugabe's ruling party and the opposition to the negotiating table on the country's deepening political and economic crisis. But negotiation efforts have floundered. The opposition blames Mugabe for plunging the southern African country into its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with 70 percent unemployment and acute shortages of food, gasoline and medicine. A state programme to seize thousands of white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks has crippled the agriculture-based economy in the past three years. Inflation has soared to 420 percent.
Mugabe's government has in recent years stepped up its crackdown on the opposition. Investment and foreign aid have dried up in protest against human rights abuses and last year's tainted presidential elections. Ncube and another senior opposition official were acquitted in July of treason. They had been charged along with the head of the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, of plotting to kill Mugabe. Tsvangirai continues to stand trial. "Opposition politics in Zimbabwe," Ncube told the forum, "is a very dangerous profession."
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