Zimbabwe Update -- The complicity of Mbeki

Kate Hoey, a Labour MP, has a piece in the Times about the complicity of Thabo Mbeki in Mad Bobby Mugabe's crimes and calls for international intervention. She writes:

IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, at a luxury hotel in Scotland, Tony Blair will sit down to dinner with President Mbeki of South Africa, an unashamed ally and apologist of the monstrous Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. As the two leaders wine and dine in Gleneagles, Robert Mugabe’s riot police will be engaged on their brutal and systematic mission to destroy the homes and livelihoods of some of the poorest people in Africa.

How can Mr Blair talk blithely of making poverty history when African leaders led by Thabo Mbeki allow such atrocities to continue unchallenged on their doorstep? The South African President must take huge responsibility for the terror and humanitarian disaster which I have seen over the past week in Zimbabwe.
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Zimbabwe was already a country staring disaster in the face. Now, with nearly a million people displaced, most without shelter or the means of earning a living, the situation is becoming a catastrophe.

The African Union must demand that the International Red Cross and United Nations relief agencies are given unrestricted access to Zimbabwe to deal with the internal refugee and food crisis, as they would in any other disaster situation.

Mr Mbeki’s presence at the G8 summit in July is a reward for promising to tackle Africa’s blight of bad governance, corruption and human rights abuses. Disgracefully, he has rallied most of Africa’s leaders in wilful denial that anything is amiss in Zimbabwe and has repeatedly blocked attempts at the UN to address the country’s appalling human rights record.

Instead of looking forward to a convivial dinner of fine food and wine, Mr Blair should be insisting that the South African President condemns the excesses of Mugabe’s regime. If he won’t, the invitation to the Gleneagles summit should be withdrawn.

Sorry, it ain't gonna happen. World leaders will let Mugabe continue with little more than a few expressions of concern and regret, South Africa will continue to give Mugabe support, and when aid arrives it will be administered through the Zimbabwean government.

This is the great flaw in Tony Blair's proposals for a new aid initiative for Africa, one that is causeing tensions with the Bush administration. Blair and EU donors insist that the programs be monitored by a consortium of African states. Mbeki's support of Mugabe illustrates just how impractical that idea is.

Read it here.

RELATED:

Back in 2003 Samantha Power had a really good article in the Atlantic comparing Robert Mugabe to Ian Smith, former PM of Independent Southern Rhodesia. I didn't link to it because the Atlantic charges for access. But it is now available on the Kennedy School website. Check it out here. It's a really good backgrounder on the current crisis in Zimbabwe.