08/10/2009

News / Targeted U.S. Sanctions on Zimbabwe to Continue, Clinton Says

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington — The Obama administration is continuing to target Zimbabwe’s leadership with economic sanctions in an effort to influence their behavior, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says.

During an August 8 visit to the Victoria Mxenge Housing Development near Cape Town, South Africa, Clinton said she and President Obama believe “the leadership under President [Robert] Mugabe has turned its back on its own people.”

She noted that more than 3 million Zimbabwean refugees have fled their country for South Africa due to a lack of opportunity and poor living conditions.

“People in Zimbabwe are starving; that's why they come here. They have no work; that's why they come here. The schools are shut. The hospitals are not working,” she said.

Zimbabweans are hard workers, she said, and deserve to return to a better life in their country. “And what's stopping it?” she asked. “Bad government. Bad decisions by the leaders.”

With the economic sanctions, “what we wanted to do was try to create some pressure on the leadership to do what it should do to take care of their own people,” the secretary said.

In her remarks with South African Minister of International Relations Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Pretoria August 7, Clinton said the sanctions were designed not to hurt Zimbabwe’s people.

South Africa has many contacts with both Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and Clinton said Pretoria is deeply involved in getting the two sides to completely fulfill a power-sharing agreement.

ZANU-PF and MDC formed a national unity government in February, but the Obama administration continues to have concerns over human rights violations and Mugabe’s approach towards democracy and the rule of law. (See “United States Seeks to Encourage Democracy, Growth in Zimbabwe.”)

Clinton said South Africa and the United States “are going to be closely consulting as to how best to deal with what is a very difficult situation for South Africa and for the United States, but mostly for the people of Zimbabwe.”

Nkoana-Mashabane likened the ZANU-PF and MDC power-sharing agreement to a forced or arranged marriage.

“They don’t always work your way, but over time you get to get used to [it]. It’s better than no marriage, for the sake of the people of Zimbabwe,” she said.

Both she and Clinton share a deep concern over the plight of Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, especially women and children.

“We have promised each other to work together to assist the people of Zimbabwe to move faster in the actual implementation of the agreement that they, themselves, have signed,” Nkoana-Mashabane said.

Clinton also met with South African President Jacob Zuma in Durban August 8. She said her visit to the country has been an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of their bilateral relationship.

Presidents Obama and Zuma have tasked their chief diplomats, Secretary Clinton and Minister Nkoana-Mashabane, to “get to work” and to “put meat on the bones” of the relationship, Clinton said.

The two countries will also be working more closely together on “regional and global challenges that we need to be leading on,” to the benefit of the broader international community, she said.

http://www.america.gov/st/peacesec-english/2009/August/20090809162149esnamfuak7.749575e-02.html?CP.rss=true

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