Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-07-Speech-4-191"
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"en.20050707.28.4-191"2
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".
Mr President, some may well have thought, following the rigged elections on 31 March, that the dictator would have had enough of repression for a bit, but, unfortunately, he had not. In order to intimidate still more, he mounted ‘Operation Drive Out Rubbish’, the ‘rubbish’ in question being in fact, cynically enough, people, some of whom – having already had to abandon their farms, which had been confiscated, were now losing their homes for the second time, and lacked any means of subsistence.
What is more than cynical, though, is the behaviour of the African Union, which declines to intervene, and South Africa is playing a key role in this. To President Mbeki, who is in Gleneagles today, I say this: ‘You are personally and politically responsible for what is happening in Zimbabwe, for you have for years been omitting to do what you could to put an end to this human tragedy! If, as is evidently the case, your ‘Old Boy Network’ regards the misery of millions of people as an acceptable price to pay in order to hold on to power, you forfeit the right to govern what has been bequeathed to you by a liberation movement!’
Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has at last delivered his trenchant criticism of this behaviour in an interview in today’s issue of the
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I call on the Council and on all the Member States to make the regime’s pariah status effective at last. You, the Council, are not even prepared to deny this clique entry visas. Those who terrorise their people in this fashion cannot gain the right to attend international conferences by availing themselves of international agreements, yet neither the Council nor our Member States are prepared to administer such a diplomatic slap on the wrist as to refuse them visas. That is another scandal, this time a scandal for European politics. There are certain Member States that are currently capitalising on other Member States’ progressive withdrawal from Zimbabwe by expanding their own presence there, and by so doing, they – all of them – make us this regime’s stooges. The people of Zimbabwe need us, so let us put a stop to this and do something effective at last."@en1
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