THE US government has said it was under no
pressure to reconsider its decision to omit President Robert Mugabe
from the landmark US-Africa summit in August.
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| Mugabe |
The gathering will seek to widen Washington’s trade, development and security ties with the African continent.
Mugabe, banned from travelling to the US over allegations of rights
abuses and electoral fraud, was excluded from the list of 47 African
leaders invited to the summit by US President Barack Obama.
But the crafty Zimbabwean leader, also banned from travelling to
Europe, recently forced the European Union (EU) to invite him to
Brussels for April’s EU-African Union summit after African leaders
threatened to boycott the gathering if Mugabe was not welcome.
It remains unclear whether African leaders will employ a similar threat to force Obama to invite Mugabe.
However, US ambassador to Zimbabwe Bruce Wharton said Mugabe’s
exclusion was “a very conscious decision” by Washington and any plans to
revise it would not be influenced by events in Europe.
"Those are decisions made by the EU but not by the United States,"
Ambassador Wharton said on the side-lines of a donation ceremony for
anti-HIV/Aids programmes in the country.
Wharton however said it was within the prerogative of the White
House to revise its decisions and "it would be a mistake for me to try
and predict the sort of decisions that the White House would make".
The US diplomat said his country's decision not to invite Mugabe to
Washington was linked to the controversial conduct of last year's
elections which saw the 90 year-old leader register a thumping victory
over bitter rival Morgan Tsvangirai and two other presidential
hopefuls.
"We are pretty clear that we believe that the July, 2013 elections had some very fundamental problems," said the US envoy.
"The same issues that were raised in the AU report, the SADC report
and the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission report, the irregularities in
the electoral process prevented us from saying we thought that it was a
credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe so that's
the fundamental problem."
Ambassador Wharton gave his support to the current push by the
opposition towards the establishment of another unity government in
Zimbabwe adding that it was up to the political protagonists to
initiate dialogue among themselves as opposed to waiting for help from
outsiders.
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