Commonwealth postpones decision on further action

Zimbabwe received a reprieve from full suspension from the Commonwealth this week when a three-man Commonwealth Chairperson's Committee on Zimbabwe decided to give the country another six months to reform. Australia's Prime Minister John Howard pressed for full suspension at the review meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, on Monday. But Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo and South Africa's Thabo Mbeki decided to wait until the end of the initial one-year suspension period before taking any further action. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth shortly after March elections, which the organisation, along with most Western countries, found was marred by politically motivated violence and conditions that "did not adequately allow for a free expression of will." A statement from the South African government following the Abuja meeting said that it regretted that the post-election reconciliation talks between the ruling ZANU-PF and opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), facilitated by Obasanjo and Mbeki, had stalled. As a result, Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon reported that "the level of suspicion, division and hostility between the various parties in Zimbabwe had increased considerably and that reports of harassment of the political opposition, the press and sections of the judiciary continued," a Commonwealth secretariat statement said. The committee noted that many of the suggestions made in the Marlborough House Statement, which followed Zimbabwe's suspension, had not come to fruition. These included helping the Zimbabwe government address the land issue, but attempts at discussing the matter with the government were not successful. The committee was also "deeply disappointed" that President Robert Mugabe had not attended the Abuja meeting. Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday that Mugabe had felt insulted by an apparently unsigned invitation, and could not negotiate the date of the meeting, making him feel as though he was being summoned. After the announcement on the troika's decision, The Herald reported that Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge had invited the Australian premier to visit Zimbabwe "to find the truth about the situation in the country".