/ 22 December 2008

Mugabe ‘an impossible obstacle’ to Zim deal

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe will have to step down if any power-sharing government deal is to succeed, Britain’s Africa minister said on Monday, echoing comments from Washington.

Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai agreed on September 15 to form a power-sharing government, but the deal has become deadlocked as the parties fight over control of key ministries.

”Power-sharing isn’t dead but Mugabe has become an absolute impossible obstacle to achieving it,” Mark Malloch Brown told BBC radio. ”He is so distrusted by all sides.”

Referring to a call on Sunday by United States Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer for Mugabe to step down to clear a path for the deal to go ahead, Malloch Brown added: ”The Americans are absolutely right — he is going to have to step aside.”

The deadlock between Mugabe and Tsvangirai has held up any chance of ending the spiralling crisis in the Southern African country, where a spreading cholera epidemic has killed more than 1 100 people and food and fuel are in short supply.

Malloch Brown described the situation in Zimbabwe as being in the ”final death throes” and said such scenarios often seemed ”terribly slow and grim and unnecessary”.

He said he doubted Mugabe would go willingly, and added that offering him immunity from prosecution could be difficult.

”In this era of the International Criminal Court, it is very hard for any particular country to offer that guarantee.”

Mugabe’s government has accused former colonial power Britain and the US of trying to exploit the cholera epidemic to end Mugabe’s 28-year rule — a suggestion dismissed by both London and Washington.

‘Large amounts of ammunition’
Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) exported more than 50 tons of ammunition to Zimbabwe earlier this year, according to a recent report by a UN group of experts for the Security Council.

In their report on UN arms trade restrictions on DRC, where factional violence has raged in the east for years, the group also said that arms it believed originated in China had been flown into DRC from Sudan.

The five-person group said that the ammunition sent to Zimbabwe must have first been imported into DRC but did not specifically say it had come from China.

The UN Security Council has imposed an arms embargo on militias operating in eastern DRC. It permits arms supplies to the Congolese government army (FARDC) but requires that exporters first notify a UN sanctions committee.

The experts’ group said it was ”aware of large amounts of ammunition arriving in eastern DRC without any notification by exporters to the sanctions committee”, and that the FARDC might be exporting weapons and ammunition to other countries in the region.

”As the DRC does not produce weapons or ammunition, this stock would have been imported to the DRC without notification and then possibly exported in violation of the original end-user agreement with the original exporter,” it said.

It said that between August 20 and 22 of this year, a Boeing-707 aircraft carried out two return trips from DRC to the Zimbabwe capital, Harare, transporting a total of 53 tons of ammunition destined for the Zimbabwean army.

”While this is not a violation of the arms embargo, it is an indication that the DRC could become a transit point for weapons destined for other countries,” it said.

The UN experts also said that a Congolese Boeing-707 had carried out five flights between Khartoum and the Congolese city of Kisangani to deliver military supplies to the FARDC.

The group said it was ”not aware of the required notification to the Security Council by the government of the Sudan” and had ”received credible information that the weapons transported originated in China”.

The group had written to the Chinese government and was awaiting a reply, it said.

A controversy erupted in April over a shipment of Chinese arms for landlocked Zimbabwe that South African port workers refused to unload. There were conflicting reports over where the arms ended up. — Reuters