Dec 7, 2007, 17:45 GMT
Lisbon - The African Union and European Union have seriously damaged their credibility by allowing Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to attend an AU-EU summit in Lisbon, Zimbabwean pro-democracy activists said as the summit opened Friday.
'We're disappointed by the blind solidarity with Mugabe shown by African leaders: they must realise the problems and suffering of the Zimbabwean people,' the exiled president of the Zimbabwe National Students' Union, Promise Mkwananzi, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
'Most African dictators and would-be dictators find it easier to stand in solidarity with Mugabe than with their suffering peoples... This summit is quite a disgrace, especially for the EU,' the chairman of the British branch of opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Ephraim Tapa, added.
Almost 80 African and European heads of government gathered in Lisbon on Friday evening to hold only the second AU-EU summit in history. The aim of the meeting was to create a new system of strategic cooperation between the continents.
But the summit risked being overshadowed by the Mugabe affair. In September, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that he would not attend if Mugabe were invited.
A number of African leaders retorted that they would not attend if Mugabe were left out.
'They regard Mugabe as the leader of the anti-colonial struggle, so even when he becomes tyrannical, they still support him,' the MDC's Elliot Pfebve explained.
As a result, EU leaders, headed by the government of Portugal, which holds the rotating presidency of the 27-member bloc, decided that Mugabe should be invited in order to maximize the presence of African leaders, and lifted a travel ban which they had imposed on him following crackdowns on pro-democracy campaigners in Zimbabwe.
That decision was met with dismay by some Mugabe opponents.
'What shocks us is Portugal's behaviour in inviting him. If Mugabe can twist the EU's arm into breaking its own sanctions, what can he do to his powerless and poverty-stricken people?' Tapa asked.
But not all condemned the move.
'The EU took the correct position. Mugabe is not bigger than two continents: he can't be allowed to stop the summit,' Mkwananzi said.
Mugabe has said that the allegations of mass human-rights abuses in his country, and the collapse of its once-flourishing economy, are part of a plot against him by Britain and the US.
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