Ive made progress on Zim: Zuma

Zuma, who is the Southern African Development Community (SADC) mediator in Zimbabwe, more than a week ago spent three days in Harare to assess the year-old power-sharing government of Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Deputy Premier Arthur Mutambara.

After holding meetings with the three Zimbabwean principals the South African leader told reporters that he was encouraged by the spirit of cooperation shown by Zimbabwes political leadership in their efforts to fully implement their September 2008 power sharing agreement.

Zuma last Wednesday told South African parliamentarians that his latest efforts to resolve the Zimbabwean question should go a long way to convince the United States and the European Union (EU) to remove the visa and financial bans.

“We believe that the latest developments will certainly be helpful in that direction,” Zuma said, adding; “The leaders and parties agreed to a package of measures to be implemented . . . The implementation of this package will certainly take the process forward.

Zuma, who earlier this month failed to convince Prime Minister Gordon Brown to ease the measures, said the progress he made in Harare and a concession he won from the British that they would think about sanctions gave him confidence that South Africa was making headway in its effort to end its northern neighbour’s crisis.

“I think certainly it will go a long way. We debated a great deal particularly around the issue of sanctions, whether the sanctions were helping the process of Zimbabwe or not. Certainly the British leadership have a very strong view that sanctions are still important and that they will help, Zuma said.

We hold a different view and we advance this view very strongly and by the time we left they were saying they will be thinking about it because they can see the sense and appreciated the fact that belonging to southern Africa we have an advantage of knowing the situation better.

And I’m therefore very confident that the progress so far made in Zimbabwe should help the world, particularly those that have applied sanctions, see the need to help us succeed in Zimbabwe as quickly as possible.”

The South African leader insisted that it was important that the sanctions imposed on Mugabe and his inner circle in 2002 be removed to aid implementation of a global political agreement (GPA) signed by Mugabe and his long time MDC rival Tsvangirai leading to the formation of the unity government in February last year.

Zuma said that Mugabe insisted last week that the continued existence of the targeted measures is dividing the unity government and hurting efforts to solve the political problems in Zimbabwe.

“It therefore creates a problem for that unity to gel, to work together,” Zuma said. “We don’t need these sanctions now. Give this unity government a chance it is not exactly as it was before. We need the sanctions to be lifted so that there is a chance for all of us to help Zimbabwe to solve its problems.”

The EU and other Western nations imposed the punitive measures against Mugabe as punishment for failure to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law. But the veteran leader says the bans are are part of Western attempts to remove him from power as punishment for seizing white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks.