Posted on 07/01/2002 3:51:16 AM PDT by Clive
Don McKinnon, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, has expressed pessimism over prospects for change in Zimbabwe, which his group recently suspended in protest at alleged flaws in President Robert Mugabe's re-election.
"It is sad that nothing is improving in that nation," McKinnon says. "I am not at all hopeful that anything is going to change."
McKinnon, whose group of 54 mainly former British colonies suspended Zimbabwe for a year in March, said Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party was showing no sign of easing its pressure on the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Nor was there any let up in the policy of seizing white-owned farms for black resettlement, he said. "On the contrary, there is a determination now to go on and take all the land."
About 3000 farmers, branded last week by Zimbabwean Agriculture Minister Joseph Made as "unrepentant racists and fascists", have been given until midnight tomorrow to stop working their farms and just over a month to leave.
McKinnon said international pressure was being ignored.
Despite its suspension of Zimbabwe for a year, the Commonwealth group has urged humanitarian aid for thousands of Zimbabweans aid groups say are facing starvation. The Commonwealth group includes 50 developing countries - 17 from Africa - among its 54 members. The group joins almost one third of the world's countries with 1,7 billion people.
Nearly 13 million people in six southern African countries are facing starvation later this year due to drought and flooding. - Reuters
He runs the Secretariat, not the Commonwealth and any executive authority that he has is circumscribed by the consensus nature of the Commonwealth.
He does not have anything equivalent to the kindo of executive powers held by, for example, the President of the United States.
He also does not have the anything equivalent to the kind of executive powers that Khofi Annan seem to have arrogated unto himself.
His opinions may be persuasive but they are not determinative.
The Commonwealth does not exert regulatory power over its members, only moral suasion.
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