Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was attending an African summit in Egypt yesterday amid growing calls for African leaders to act after his widely discredited election win.
African Union (AU) commission chief Jean Ping told the summit that Africa must assume its responsibility in the Zimbabwe crisis, amid fears that it could destabilize southern Africa.
“Africa must fully shoulder its responsibility and do everything in its power to help the Zimbabwe parties to work together so as to overcome current challenges,” he said.
The two-day meeting of the 53-nation bloc in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh opened the day after the AU’s top conflict prevention body, the Peace and Security Council, failed to rule on Zimbabwe and referred the thorny issue to the summit itself.
Mugabe, 84, was sworn in for a sixth term on Sunday, having been declared the overwhelming winner of a one-man election run-off after opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew because of violence.
A delegation of AU observers said yesterday that the election fell short of the AU’s democratic standards of democracy, while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon slammed Friday’s vote result as illegitimate.
African leaders have warned that the crisis could destabilize southern Africa and that power cannot be handed entirely either to Mugabe or to Tsvangirai because of the country’s political polarization.
But so far there has been no consensus among the AU’s 53 member states, with the pan-African body issuing diplomatic statements and pushing for a power-sharing arrangement between Mugabe and Tsvangirai’s MDC.
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) told African leaders they had a “historic opportunity” to denounce the election as a sham.
UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro of Tanzania told leaders at the summit’s opening session that the situation in Zimbabwe could set a “dangerous political precedent” after voting took place under “a climate that was not conducive to credible and fair elections.”
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