Mugabe overshadows Commonwealth summit

Commonwealth leaders on Friday set up a six-nation panel to meet on the sidelines of the Abuja summit to discuss the contentious issue of Zimbabwe's suspension, news reports said. Summit host President Olusegun Obasanjo proposed that representatives from Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mozambique and South Africa meet separately from the main summit to draw up a report on the issue. The team would then report back to the leaders during their two-day weekend retreat, said Agence France Presse (AFP). The issue of Zimbabwe has so far overshadowed the summit agenda. A group of Southern African countries are believed to want Zimbabwe's suspension from the Commonwealth lifted. The so-called "white Commonwealth" led by Britain and Australia have resisted. Zimbabwe was suspended in March last year after President Robert Mugabe was re-elected in a poll marred by violence and alleged fraud. Meanwhile, Mugabe on Friday lashed out at the Commonwealth and repeated his threat to pull his country out of the 54-member organisation. "If the choice was made for us ... to remain with our sovereignty and lose membership of the Commonwealth, then I would say, let the Commonwealth go," he said at the opening of his ZANU-PF party's annual conference in the southern Zimbabwean town of Masvingo. "What is the Commonwealth to us? It is a club. There are other clubs we can join." The issue of land reform and Zimbabwe's economic crisis dominated the official agenda of the Masvingo conference, the theme of which was "total land use for economic turn-around", AFP reported. International humanitarian agencies have blamed the country's land redistribution programme in part for the food shortages which will affect more than 5.5 million people from January 2004. The country's inflation rate is over 500 percent, and the economy is starved of foreign exchange. "The nation expects the ruling party to show ingenuity in coming up with measures that will breathe new life into the economy," the official Herald newspaper said in an editorial on Friday.