Mugabe faces critics in Harare

President Robert Mugabe faced his harshest critics on Tuesday at a regional summit that took five other heads of state to Harare in a bid to stem Zimbabwe’s political troubles, AFP reported.

The leaders of Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe were meeting behind closed doors for a second day on Tuesday with a broad cross-section of Zimbabwean society, including the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). According to the report, the summit marked the first time that Mugabe had met with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai since the opposition party was created almost two years ago.

It said Tsvangirai held out little hope of progress in resolving the country’s political crisis, in which MDC supporters have suffered violent intimidation since before the parliamentary elections in June 2000. “It’s a meeting about meetings. They are talking just to talk. That’s all we expect out of this. We don’t expect it to go very far,” he was quoted as saying.

On the sidelines of the summit, rights groups who have been highly critical of Mugabe’s record said the government had blocked them from meeting with the visiting heads of state, the report said. University of Zimbabwe professor John Makumbe told a news conference that a coalition of leading rights groups, grouped under the Crisis Conference Coordinating Committee, had not been allowed to meet the leaders.

He distributed a statement the coalition had planned to make to the presidents. It called for independent monitors to oversee Mugabe’s commitment to curb violence, as agreed in a Commonwealth-brokered deal last week.

“Civil society believes that effective monitoring mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that the government puts a stop to the violence being perpetrated predominantly by its militant supporters,” the statement was quoted as saying. On Monday the leaders met white farmers, on whose land pro-government militants have staged sometimes violent attacks for the past 18 months. They also met war veterans, who insisted that their farm occupations were a peaceful protest.