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'Mugabe won't listen'
04/12/2007 22:40 - (SA)
Brussels - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is unlikely to listen to his European critics at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon this weekend, the Zimbabwean Human Rights Association warned on Tuesday.
"Mugabe is not going to listen and I think as much as they (Europeans) are planning on giving him a lesson, he is also planning on giving them a lesson," the group's president Arnold Tsunga told a human rights conference in Brussels.
"He is going to be referring to historical disadvantages Africa has suffered from the colonial process, out of slavery. He is going to divert from the real issues," he said, adding Mugabe uses the same rhetoric with his own people.
The nation's institutions "are made to brainwash Zimbabweans and to portray Zimbabwe as a country under siege and penalised for trying to allow for blacks to be in control of their own economic destiny," the lawyer added.
The Portuguese presidency of the European Union invited Mugabe to the EU-Africa summit on Saturday and Sunday despite a warning from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he and his cabinet would boycott the event if the Zimbabwean leader attends - which Mugabe says he plans to do.
During a state of the nation address to Zimbabwe's parliament on Tuesday, Mugabe suggested his invitation to the summit amounted to the failure of an allegedly "sinister campaign led by Britain to isolate us".
A debate on Zimbabwe's political situation and its deep economic woes is expected to be on the summit agenda.
Portuguese leaders argue it is preferable for the EU to have the chance to give Mugabe its opinion of his regime than to ban him from what will only be the second such EU-Africa summit.
"I greatly doubt that in relations with dictators the best policy is ostracism," Portuguese European Affairs Minister Manuel Lobo Antunes said on Sunday.
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