A summit of southern African leaders called to discuss Zimbabwe's post-election crisis opened today with a plea from its chairman not to ignore their neighbour's plight.
With no result declared two weeks after Zimbabwe's presidential election, Zambia's President Levy Mwanawasa told the emergency summit of the Southern African Development Community that doing nothing was not an option.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe - accused by the opposition of holding back the result of the 29 March election and of leading a campaign of intimidation - turned down an invitation to attend the summit.
Zimbabwe's opposition leader and self-proclaimed presidential victor Morgan Tsvangirai was, however, seated in the front row.
But his hopes that leaders might issue a hard-hitting statement and even put pressure on Mr Mugabe to stand down were dealt a blow in the hours before the summit when South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki stopped over in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, en route to Lusaka.
After his first face-to-face talks with Mr Mugabe since the elections, Mr Mbeki ignored pleas for outside pressure to be levied upon the veteran Zimbabwean leader and demanded that things be allowed to run their course.
‘There is no crisis in Zimbabwe,’ he told journalists. ‘The body authorised to release the results is the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission - let's wait for them to announce the results.'
Mr Mbeki, who was the chief mediator between Zimbabwe's governing ZANU-PF party and Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change in the build-up to the election, has come under fire for his policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’.
Mr Mugabe, alongside him, made no mention of the election, but denied he was snubbing the summit, saying, ‘We are very good friends and very good brothers. Sometimes you attend, sometimes you have other things holding you back.’
The head of Mr Mugabe's four-minister delegation in Lusaka had earlier dismissed the summit as unnecessary and denounced the invitation granted to Mr Tsvangirai.
