New Zealand was to ask China yesterday to put pressure on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe over human-rights abuses in the southern African state, where tens of thousands have been made homeless in recent months.
Mugabe is expected to arrive in Beijing this weekend on a trip that human rights campaigners say will include a plea for oil and food to aid his state's failing economy.
"We are taking the opportunity to raise [with China] ... major concerns about what is happening in Zimbabwe with ... politically motivated attacks on people, making them homeless," a spokesman for Foreign Minister Phil Goff said.
A so-called urban renewal drive by Mugabe's government has seen police torch and bulldoze tens of thousands of homes in the campaign to clean up shantytowns, markets and other structures they deem illegal. Several hundred thousand have been made homeless in the process. The government's action has drawn widespread international condemnation.
New Zealand's approach to China comes as the South Pacific state's national cricket team readies for a scheduled tour of Zimbabwe next month.
While the center-left government has called on the team to abandon the tour, it has rejected the option of passing special law to stop it.
New Zealand Cricket has repeatedly stated it must make the scheduled tour as a contractual obligation under the International Cricket Council's future tours program. Failure to do so would result in severe financial penalties and fines. New Zealand would also ask China to change the way in which it gives aid to Zimbabwe.
"New Zealand is asking China to channel aid to Zimbabwe through proper aid projects so that it goes to the people who need it and can't be subverted by the Mugabe regime," spokesman James Funnell said.
New Zealand has been a harsh critic of Mugabe. Goff recently called him a leader with his own people's "blood on his hands."
The South Pacific nation was trying "to raise the temperature" over Zimbabwe in several multinational bodies, Funnell said. Its diplomats already began calls on the UN to have the Mugabe's regime's human rights abuses condemned in a special resolution.
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