Washington urges isolation of Mugabe

The US government is working with Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique on strategies to isolate Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner said. He was speaking in Washington on Tuesday at a briefing with US Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Andrew Natsios, where it was announced that a further 190,000 mt of US food would be contributed to help alleviate the drought in Southern Africa. Focusing on Zimbabwe, the worst off country in the region, Natsios said that Mugabe had done at least five things that could turn Zimbabwe's drought into a famine, and slammed the confiscation of commercial farms which he called "the insurance policy" for the people of Southern Africa. "It is madness to arrest commercial farmers in the middle of a drought when they could grow food to save people from starvation," he said. He criticised the government's price controls which discouraged food imports, the government's fixed exchange rate, and accused the government of politicising food aid. He said that while Zimbabwe was the worst affected by the drought, it was being the least co-operative. Responding to a question on what the US government planned to do about Zimbabwe's policies Kansteiner said: "As President Bush and Colin Powell have both said on a number of occasions, we do not see President Mugabe as the democratically legitimate leader of the country. The election was fraudulent and it was not free and it was not fair." Suggested trade embargoes were a "blunt instrument" which would affect the whole population, which the US did not want to do, he said. "What we're trying to do is influence those policymakers at the top. And so, in that sense, we're continuing to work with the South Africans and the Botswanans and Mozambicans on what are some of the strategies that we can use to isolate Mugabe in the sense that he has to realise that the political status quo is not acceptable." South Africa has increasingly come under fire for its "quiet diplomacy" towards Zimbabwe. Ronnie Mamoepa, spokesman for South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs told IRIN the South African government was not prepared to comment on Kansteiner's statement on the country's possible involvement in isolating Mugabe. Zimbabwe government officals contacted by IRIN also declined to respond. Kansteiner said the US was working with human rights groups and independent journalists in Zimbabwe and was looking at ways that it could join the European Union (EU) on financial freezes targeting high-ranking government members. He conceded that though the US had a travel ban on certain ZANU-PF members, treaties obliged the country to allow entry to delegates attending UN summits. Referring to reports that some farms designated for resettlement had been turned over to members of the ruling elite instead of poor people, Natsios said: "It is a disgusting land grab where you're just basically stealing land from one group to another." Concluding his comments on Zimbabwe, Kansteiner said it was "a tragic case" that farmworkers were victims of "ill prepared and ill-thought-out policies."