Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga intensified his attacks against Robert Mugabe yesterday, saying foreign troops should prepare to intervene in Zimbabwe to end a worsening humanitarian crisis and the president should be investigated for crimes against humanity.
Joining several world leaders’ calls for action on Zimbabwe since Friday, Odinga urged the African Union (AU) to call an emergency meeting to authorise sending troops into Zimbabwe.
“If no troops are available, then the AU must allow the United Nation to send its forces into Zimbabwe with immediate effect, to take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to the people dying of cholera,” he said.
More than 600 Zimbabweans have died of the disease since an outbreak in August but health officials fear the toll may be much higher. They warn deaths could spiral into the thousands because of the complete collapse of Zimbabwe’s health system, the scarcity of food and the coming rainy season, which may help spread infection .
Odinga said Mugabe had reduced a once-prosperous country to a “basket case” and warned that “Mugabe’s case deserves no less than investigations by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.”
Odinga also slammed other African leaders for being slow to criticise Zimbabwe, saying they had shamed the continent by treating Mugabe with “kid gloves” because Mugabe had supported their liberation struggles from colonial powers.
“We refuse to accept the idea that African countries should be judged by lesser standards than other countries in the world,” Odinga said. “Participation in the liberation struggle is no licence for anyone to own a country.”
He declined to say whether Kenya was ready to send troops. The AU and United Nations (UN) are already overstretched in Africa, unable to fulfil commitments in Sudan’s Darfur region or war-ravaged Somalia.
Zimbabwe is on the verge of collapse. Food stocks are running out, the spread of cholera is aided by poor water supplies, and unemployment is above 80% while prices double every 24 hours.
SA has pledged aid and officials will assess the scale of the crisis today.
Odinga is the latest in a series of world leaders, including Botswana’s President Ian Khama and Foreign Minister Phandu Skelemani, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to call on Mugabe to step down.
Brown has branded Mugabe’s government a “blood-stained regime” and said at the weekend it was responsible for the cholera epidemic. The world must tell Mugabe “enough is enough”, Brown said. Rice said on Friday the veteran leader’s departure from office was long overdue.
Zimbabwe’s government, meanwhile, accused former colonial ruler Britain of using the cholera epidemic to rally western support for an invasion, the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper said yesterday.
The growing western criticism signalled a plot to oust Mugabe’s government militarily, his spokesman, George Charamba, was quoted as saying. “I don’t know what this mad prime minister (Brown) is talking about. He is asking for an invasion of Zimbabwe ... but he will come unstuck.”
Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, has also voiced distress. “There is bitter disappointment in the current leadership,” he said on behalf of the Elders, a group that includes former US president Jimmy Carter and Tutu. “This government has not demonstrated the ability to lead the country out of its current crisis,” Annan said.
THE KENYAN Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula attacked that country’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga over his call for African Union troops to be sent to Zimbabwe to forcibly remove the Government of President Mugabe.
RispondiEliminaWetangula told a news conference in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi that Odinga’s calls to the African Union to deploy peace keepers was ‘uncalled for’, saying Zimbabwe was not under invasion or armed rebellion.
He said Kenya would respect the position of the African Union that commissioned Southern African Development Community (Sadc) to negotiate the matter.
He also said that AU statutes have no provision for intervention in sovereign states, adding that the AU did not have the mandate or its own reserve of troops for such intervention and would need to ask member states to “donate” troops.
Troops, he said, can only be deployed by willing states and not the AU.
“The constitute Act of the African Union does not allow a country to be invaded unless there is a rebellion which is not the case in Zimbabwe. Secondly, the AU has no troops to send anywhere. It can only request countries to contribute and I don’t believe that is the way to go,” he said.
Article 4 (Principles) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union - Organization of African Unity adopted in Lome in 2000, says the AU shall function in accordance with the principles of "sovereign equality and interdependence among Member States of the Union","prohibition of the use of force or threat to use force among Member States of the Union" and "non-interference by any member States", among other principles.
Odinga's call for sending AU troops to Zimbabwe, therefore is unthinkable. The capacity of the AU is currently exhausted due to its involvements in Darfur and Somalia. It will be unrealistic to expect it to add Zimbabwe on its plate.
Wetangula also criticized the West for imposing sanctions against Zimbabwe and said that those sanctions only hurt civilians who are not in any way linked to the Government.
“If you impose sanctions in Zimbabwe today, President Mugabe will not miss a meal. It is the ordinary man who will be suffering. The AU must decide a better way of dealing with the crisis,” he insisted adding that Sadc had been mandated to be the official interface of the crisis by the AU.
He added that similar tactics against the Boers of South Africa failed and innocent people bore the brunt.
He said the ouster of former South African president, Thabo Mbeki was a major blow to the Zimbabwean peace process and urged the MDC party and Zanu PF to come to an agreement about power-sharing.
"We appeal to President Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai to see reason and come to an agreement to save the people of Zimbabwe from further suffering," he said.