adminThe group calling itself “Friends of Zimbabwe” comprised of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, the EU, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Looking at these countries, they should have met under the banner of “Friends of Britain” because there hasn’t been anything friendly in the way these countries have related to our country and its people over the past decade.
Even the communiqué they pre-emptively produced over the weekend reads more like an MDC-T election road-map as it contains the litany of demands made by the MDC-T leadership to their coalition government partners.
Infact that communiqué, that differed from the one leaked to the Press over the weekend only in item 5, is akin to the charge sheet the MDC-T has produced to make a case for delaying elections beyond June 29, the day the life of the current Parliament ends in terms of our Constitution.
Item 5 reads; “We took note of views from all representatives from the Government of National Unity including on; the importance of full implementation of the GPA, the facilitation role played by Sadc, their request for a lifting of international sanctions, peaceful free and fair elections, and respect for the rule of law.’’
But as we have always said the sanctions are illegal and unjustified.
We do not have a quarrel with any of the countries that converged on London to lend support to Britain as it met our re-engagement team.
And as Justice and Legal Affairs Minister Patrick Chinamasa pointed out to the Western alliance, Zimbabwe would rather engage Britain bilaterally.
There is nothing international about the dispute that arose out of the British government’s refusal to honour its colonial obligations to meet the costs of land earmarked for resettlement in Zimbabwe.
The sanctions imposed on our people are an illegality as they were predicated on London’s wilful violation of the international law of succession.
We hope the other countries that pledged friendship with us by meeting under the banner of Friends of Zimbabwe will walk the talk and relate to us in the same manner they relate among themselves.
As Minister Chinamasa pointed out, friends do not sanction one another. They do not declare war on one another. Sanctions are a form of warfare which, in the words of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro whose country has reeled under an illegal US embargo for 50 years, have the effect of silent atomic bombs.
We hope Britain and its allies will move to normalise relations as we never had a quarrel with the 27-member EU bloc, neither do we have a quarrel with their cousins across the Atlantic and/or Indian Oceans.
Ours is just a bilateral dispute with one of their own, the United Kingdom.
We take this opportunity to remind our self-proclaimed friends that the only option left is dialogue.
To this end we challenge the Americans, Japanese and Australians who bought into a fight that was never theirs in the first place, to also commit to dialogue and re-engagement.
It’s high time our country benefited from its membership of global multilateral institutions that hitherto are constrained from giving us lines of credit due to the US sanctions law, the so-called Zimbabwe Transition to Democracy and Economic Recovery Act.
What the British and their allies did yesterday was encouraging but inadequate, real friends walk the talk.
Online Reporter