“I think that anytime anyone – anytime there is suffering or people aren’t allowed to live free as everybody is guaranteed the right to under God, as the president has said, that that should be condemned,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said today. “I’m not going to comment as to how many protests there are against a regime.”
She had been responding to several questions from Les Kinsolving, WND’s correspondent at the White House, about the Zimbabwe situation, which developed rapidly over the last week as an opposition leader said he would not be in a violence-tainted runoff against Mugabe and hundreds of thousands reportedly refused to vote then.
Kinsolving had asked whether the White House believes apartheid in South Africa ever killed and tortured as many blacks as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, to which Perino responded that it would be impossible for her to quantify.
Kinsolving also asked if the White House believes “in the United States there have ever been as many demonstrations against Zimbabwe and against [Idi] Amin’s Uganda by black organizations like the NAACP than the 5,000 who picketed the apartheid South African embassy?”
Perino also suggested that a meeting of African leaders may not yet have yielded its final results.
“Let’s see how the meeting goes,” she responded to another question. “We don’t believe that the Mugabe regime is a legitimate government. We think that because they ran a sham election last week, in which they intimidated every voter who would have voted against Mugabe, that the African leaders had an opportunity at this week’s meeting to really dig into these issues. Because one of the single greatest challenges of regional instability in southern Africa is Zimbabwe. And let’s just see how the meeting goes.”
She said the White House is confident African leaders understand the situation.
“I do think that it is unfortunate that the Mugabe – Mugabe’s actions ha[ve] cast a negative light on some really good democratic leaders in Africa. I don’t want them all to be painted with the same brush, because I do think that there are many of them who are working very hard to institute democratic reforms in their own way, commensurate with their culture and their traditions and their history,” she said.
“In the meantime, regardless of what happens at that African Union meeting, President Bush has instructed the secretaries of state and treasury to develop sanctions against the regime and we will be working on those,” she said.
She said the White House also will press the United Nations for strong action, even though the United States could act unilaterally.
“What we would like is for people, first and foremost, to feel safe in their own country and to let their voices be heard. I know that down in the area there’s conversation about a possible power-sharing agreement. I don’t know a lot about that; I think that it’s a little bit too early to say. But first and foremost, we want people to feel safe in their own country,” she said.
She said she couldn’t speculate on the results if Mugabe would be detained physically, and she doesn’t know if that was being contemplated.
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