Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-14-Speech-3-307"
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".
Your supplementary questions are very much appreciated. Since it is so very topical, perhaps I might begin with what has happened to the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. According to the most up-to-date information, the 14 persons who had been arrested but not injured – having, as required, appeared in court – were then sent home again, since the court evidently realised that there was no case to answer against them.
Mr Tsvangirai, however, who is evidently seriously injured, has not yet been sent home. According to the latest information, he has sustained a fractured skull, has lost a great deal of blood, and is at present in intensive care. Another eleven persons were also injured in the course of being arrested, and were for that reason unable to appear at what might, if one were to use such modern terminology to describe it, be called the custody hearing. It is as yet unclear what has become of them. We are of course working on the assumption that they, like the uninjured persons, have also been set free.
I want to take this opportunity to reiterate that the Council Presidency has expressed its great concern about this mistreatment and the serious injuries sustained by opposition leaders in the following terms: ‘The Presidency once more emphasises the responsibility of the Zimbabwean Government for the safety and freedom from bodily harm of the arrested persons, and it will continue to observe closely what happens in Zimbabwe’. We are, then, determined to maintain an active interest in the area in view of these dramatic developments.
While still on this subject, I want to address two other matters, firstly the behaviour of the other African states, in which, of course, people know what the Mugabe regime is like, and are well aware that this dramatic turn of events in Zimbabwe – where unemployment is running at 80% and inflation has gone over the 5 000% mark – will have a dangerous effect on the whole region.
It is, however, precisely because this development is so threatening that different states are responding in different ways. The response of the community of African states is not uniform; for example, South Africa, which is certainly affected by what is going on, is putting its trust in quiet diplomacy, which it wants to use as a means of avoiding a breach between it and a state that is a neighbour, and a very important one at that. This is, without a doubt, motivated by economic interests.
We also see reciprocity at work here, in that, the firmer the international pressure and the stronger the condemnation of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, the more cautious the African states become, and the more they practise what they might well term African solidarity. We simply have to bear this in mind and try to deal with the situation in an intelligent manner – which brings me to the other supplementary question, which had to do with the preparations for the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, which is scheduled for December.
At the moment, we are prioritising the preparation of the substance of this important summit, and we regard this, indeed, as the most important task of our presidency. There are, of course, still a number of other problematic African issues that will certainly demand our attention in the course of this year, and that is why we believe we have to do a great deal of work, in the first six months of it, on preparing the ground for this Africa Summit.
The decision on who is to be invited to attend the summit will be taken rather later on in the year, and it is for this reason that we will be paying careful attention to what is currently going on in Zimbabwe, but no decision has as yet been taken on who is actually going to be invited, and so I am unable to answer this question at the present time."@en1
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