JOHANNESBURG, Sept 2: Zimbabwe shot to the fore at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg on Monday with Namibia and New Zealand laying bare the raw divisions stirred by President Robert Mugabe.
Harking back to colonial exploitation of the African continent, Namibian President Sam Nujoma singled out British Prime Minister Tony Blair as being at the root of one of the region’s biggest problems.
“We here in southern Africa have one big problem, created by the British. The honourable Tony Blair is here, and he created the situation in Zimbabwe,” Nujoma said in his address to the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
“The EU, who have imposed the sanctions against Zimbabwe, must raise them immediately, otherwise it is useless to come here,” he told a crowded hall with 78-year-old Mugabe in the audience. The EU slapped sanctions on President Robert Mugabe’s government after presidential elections in March, which the EU deemed illegitimate, and the seizure of white-owned farms.
One of Mugabe’s sternest critics, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, blamed his policies for exacerbating a food crisis.
“In one case this disaster has been made much worse by deliberate and cynical government policies,” Clark said in her speech without naming Mugabe who was due to address the summit later on Monday.
Blair, who took the floor about 10 minutes after Nujoma’s finger-jabbing tirade, did not respond to the accusations.
“(Blair’s) focus is exclusively on the outcome of the summit,” a spokesman said, adding that the Namibian president’s words were not a surprise. “He has been saying it for years.”
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters the rest of the world should follow the EU in imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe.
“I think the whole international community should adopt such a firm stance,” he said. “Personally, I don’t see any need for further steps...Everybody is aware of our strong criticism of President Mugabe.”
Mugabe has vowed to press ahead with the eviction of 2,900 of the country’s 4,500 remaining white commercial farmers despite legal challenges at home and criticism in the West.
About 1,500 people, mainly black South Africans, gathered on Monday for an anti-Mugabe march outside the conference centre.
Jenni Williams, spokeswoman for the Zimbabwe white farmers’ pressure group Justice for Agriculture, said Mugabe was redistributing land to his cronies and allies.
“We hunger for food, yet Mugabe is taking away the land that has fed us. We hunger for peace and yet Mugabe has now formed a war cabinet to fight his own people,” Williams said.
Nujoma said white farms represented most of the land in Zimbabwe while millions of poor Zimbabweans were landless.
“The British colonial settlers in Zimbabwe today, they own 78 percent of the land in Zimbabwe, and Zimbabwe is a tiny country,” he said. “It has 14 million indigenous (people) who have no land.”
He said Africans who were shipped as slaves to the Americas were still suffering in the modern age.
“The Africans who were taken there are being discriminated (against) in America and South America ... They are the underdogs, they are the poorest of the world.
“We the African people have suffered more than any other nation in the world,” Nujoma said.
Children’s advice: Children urged the Earth Summit to “take action” to ensure sustainable development of the planet and give future generations a chance of happiness.
The message was delivered by Analiz Vergara, 14, from Ecuador, Canada’s Justin Friesen and Liao Mingyu from China, both 11, who were given the stage shortly before the summit began.
“Most world leaders do not listen. We are disappointed because too many adults are more interested in money than in the environment,” they said, reporting back from an international conference on children and the environment in Canada three months ago.
The three children said that though they were “still only babies” in 1992 when the first Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, they knew that in the past 10 years children had continued to suffer as a result of the damage to the environment.
—Reuter/AFP