Insulting Mugabe no help - Zuma

2008-04-24 14:58

London - ANC leader Jacob Zuma said on Thursday that insulting Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe was fruitless and unlikely to unlock the crisis sparked by the country's election.

"What do you derive from swearing at Mugabe from New York and then sleeping afterwards?" Zuma told journalists in London.

"If South Africa took that route, we would be taking the wrong route."

Although Zuma did not mention British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by name, he appeared to be referring to a speech Brown made to the UN Security Council last week in which he said "no one thinks" Mugabe won the March 29 vote.

Zuma rejected criticism of South Africa's approach to the Zimbabwe electoral crisis, saying it had condemned reported violence in the country as "unacceptable".

"I don't know what else we can do," said Zuma, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC).

"I do not know why we are being made a police state for Zimbabwe."

Arms embargo

He rejected calls for a weapons embargo on Zimbabwe in the wake of the election, saying: "I do not think we have reached the stage of an arms embargo."

But Zuma praised dockers in Durban, who he said had "correctly" refused to unload a Chinese ship carrying ammunition destined for Zimbabwe.

"That was a very appropriate response," he said.

The ship carrying the weapons was forced to abandon plans to offload in Durban after activists backed by dockers won a court case which prevented it from transporting the cargo overland to the border with landlocked Zimbabwe.

The An Yue Jiang was carrying three million rounds of assault rifle ammunition, 3 000 mortar rounds and 1 500 rocket-propelled grenades, according to an inventory published by a South African newspaper.

The ship is now being brought back to China, a Chinese government official said on Thursday.

Brown called on Wednesday for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and warned Mugabe that the delay in announcing election results from the vote was "unacceptable".

Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial power, has accused Mugabe of trying to "steal" the election by engineering a recount to prevent the opposition from winning.

- AFP