acking the application of pressure on the Harare regime, diplomatic sources confirmed this week.
Last week The Zimbabwean revealed that the South African government had secretly admitted as long ago as February that Mugabe was the problem. This information was gleaned from minutes of a meeting between SA officials and members of the MDC (Mutambara).
The minutes state: “The meeting was held as a follow up to the meeting held in Tshwane on the 3rd of October 2006 where the objective was to develop a common position on what South Africa and the SADC should be doing to bring an end to the Zimbabwe crisis.”
A senior official in the SA government confirmed this week that the SADC economic rescue package proposed at the Lusaka summit had been scuttled by Mugabe’s stubbornness.
Mbeki’s officials came to a position some time last year that they could not continue shielding Mugabe and his regime because “they had been found to be highly un-credible and inconsistent and had failed to honour the many promises they made to the SA government”.
“One of those promises was that there would be the repealing or at least amending of bad pieces of legislation, mainly POSA (Public Order and Security Act) and AIPPA (Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act),” said a senior official.
“Mugabe had also promised to stop, not reduce, state-sponsored acts of terror and violence against the opposition and civil society, as well as his verbal insults against the west, which have been one of the major causes of the country’s isolation and subsequent problems.”
He said the SA government was also concerned at the “unrestrained economic meltdown, which caused serious effects on the whole of SADC”.
A Zambian diplomatic source said that in deliberations on the Zimbabwean crisis, the Zambian government and President Levy Mwanawasa had reached a consensus “that Mugabe had to go in order to solve the crisis and that there was need to support various efforts at democratising the country’s politics, including the application of pressure by the whole world”.
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