Last Updated: Friday, 20 December 2002
?EU-Africa summit faces collapse over Harare?
STELLENBOSCH.
AN upcoming EU-Africa summit could collapse if Zimbabwe is not allowed to attend, a South African government minister hinted yesterday, saying the ball was in Europe?s court.
"There is no Africa without Zimbabwe. Such a continent doesn?t exist. Africa is indivisible," Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told reporters at a ruling African National Congress conference in Stellenbosch outside Cape Town.
"The summit is not about individual countries, it?s about the continent."
Leaders from the 15-member EU and Africa are scheduled to meet in Lisbon, Portugal, from April 3-4 next year but an EU travel ban imposed on Government and Zanu-PF officials has raised doubts that the meeting will take place.
"It is up to them (Europe) to see how they overcome the problem. The ball is in their court. We as Africans are ready to go," Dlamini-Zuma said.
Brussels imposed the visa ban on President Mugabe and 19 other top Government officials in February and the list was lengthened in September to total 72 people.
The Zimbabwe travel ban has hampered recent high-level meetings between the EU and Africa.
A meeting in Brussels in November between the EU and Africa, Caribbean and Pacific countries was cancelled last month after the Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Cde Chris Kuruneri and the Minister of State for State Enterprises and Parastatals, Cde Paul Mangwana were barred from entering the premises of the European parliament.
Earlier, a ministerial conference between the EU and Sadc had to be switched to Mozambique?s capital Maputo from Copenhagen after current EU president Denmark said it would not allow a delegation from Zimbabwe to attend.
The Zimbabwe Government maintains that the EU was pressured by Britain into imposing so-called smart sanctions after the Presidential election won by President Mugabe in March. Harare says its differences with London are purely a bilateral matter arising from the refusal by the Labour government led by Tony Blair to honour promises made at the Lancaster House talks of 1979 to provide funds for land reform in Zimbabwe. Relations between Zimbabwe and Britain soured after the Government embarked on land reforms. ? AFP/Herald Reporter
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"Ivinicus factus sum veritabem diceus." ( I have become an enemy for speaking the truth ) St Paul!
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Mitayo Potosi
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