By Ephraim Keoreng
Botswana has condemned Zimbabwe for refusing entry to United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak.
Though the MDC-T part of the government of national unity had invited the UN official, President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party are said to be against the visit. Nowak was invited by Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai only to be denied entry into Zimbabwe by immigration officials. Nowak was expected to spend eight days in the country.
The development comes a few days after Tsvangirai and his MDC-T colleagues walked out of the government of unity, citing frustration over ZANU-PF’s lack of commitment to the Global Political Agreement (GPA), under which the coalition was formed.
A communique from Botswana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the Nowak incident stands as a reminder to “one in which a Group of Eminent Persons were rebuffed, when they attempted last year to lend a hand in mediating the political crisis in that country”.
The statement added that recent events in Zimbabwe point to acts of bad faith in the implementation of the GPA by ZANU-PF. “Botswana holds the strong view that there should be genuine power sharing within the unity government as prescribed under the GPA. A situation of domination by one party is not acceptable and should not be tolerated,” the statement said.
Botswana urged the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to take firm measures to ensure that the parties in the GPA live up to the commitments they made.”Failure to honour these commitments leaves no other choice than the calling for fresh elections under international supervision, to allow for the Zimbabweans to freely choose their leaders,” Botswana said. Meanwhile two SADC Troika on defence and politics was expected in Zimbabwe yesterday to hold discussions with the country’s two principals-Mugabe and Tsvangirai.
The Troika, made up of foreign ministers from Angola, Mozambique and Zambia is on a fact-finding mission to establish the causes of the deepening political rift in the Zimbabwe government. Efforts to get a comment from the SADC secretariat were futile at the time of going to press, as the lines rang unanswered. Source Mmegi Online