EU to extend sanctions on Zimbabwe: diplomats

EU to extend sanctions on Zimbabwe: diplomats

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By Staff Reporter

THE European Union (EU) is set to extend sanctions on Zimbabwe for another year including an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze on President Robert Mugabe and other top officials, EU diplomats say.

The 27-member bloc, which accuses Harare of widespread human rights violations, plans to go ahead with the move despite the risk that the travel ban on Mugabe could again scupper longstanding plans for an EU-Africa summit, they say.

A new split in the EU was feared, with both France and Portugal said to be considering summit invitations to President Mugabe that would weaken the diplomatic isolation of his regime that Britain is trying to maintain.

European officials said there is an agreement in principle to continue five-year-old EU travel sanctions against senior Zimbabwean officials, and a formal decision is due to be announced on February 20.

However, loopholes in those sanctions could allow France and Portugal to invite Mugabe or his aides to summits in Europe, undermining British efforts to keep the Zimbabwean leader under pressure for human rights abuses.

A French official said he could not confirm whether President Jacques Chirac had invited Mugabe to a France-Africa summit in Cannes on February 14. "The invitations are still being sent. The list will be published only later."

Portugal is also hoping to invite Mugabe to Lisbon for an EU-Africa summit in November. Both Lisbon and Paris are concerned that if he is excluded, other governments from the region, particularly South Africa, might boycott the meetings. Neither France nor Portugal has so far applied for exemptions to the sanctions regime to issue invitations on the grounds that the meetings they are planning will address human rights issues.

But British officials and human rights groups have argued that Zimbabwean participation in such high-profile events would make sanctions all but meaningless.

The Harare government has denounced the sanctions as illegal. Nathan Shamuyarira, a spokesperson for the ruling Zanu-PF party, said recently: "Britain is pursuing a colonial practice, repression of other nations, and I hope other countries will not be dragged in its sinister agendas."

The list of visa bans and freezing of assets includes more than a hundred ministers and officials.

The EU accuses them of human rights violations, and violations of freedom of speech and assembly in Zimbabwe.

"They will be prolonged for another year," an EU diplomat said of existing sanctions due to expire on February 20.

"Every year the European Commission does a report on the situation in Zimbabwe, it has not changed so the conclusions are the same," another official at the EU executive said.

The sanctions were initially triggered by the controversial distribution of white-owned commercial farms to mainly landless blacks and Mugabe's disputed re-election in 2002.

Critics say the seizures have destroyed Zimbabwe's economy, turning the country from a regional agricultural leader to a nation barely able to feed itself amid a deepening crisis marked by food and fuel shortages and inflation above 1,200 per cent.

Mugabe says the sanctions are responsible for Zimbabwe's economic crisis and he says his land policy was necessary because former colonial power Britain did not make good on promises at the time of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.

Eldred Masunungure, chairman at University of Zimbabwe's Political Science Department, said the EU sanctions have failed to reach their objective and have if anything hit the population of Zimbabwe.

"I think the sanctions by their very nature are a blunt instrument and their impact tends to spread beyond the target persons," Masunungure said.

"On the government's side they have been felt but as you can see Mugabe has not changed his policies." - Reuters

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