Plots in the press room - Zimbabwe's battle comes to Lisbon (Extra)

Dec 9, 2007, 16:23 GMT

Lisbon - While European and African leaders argued about Zimbabwe in the lofty halls of Lisbon's conference centre, the row took on a bizarre twist in the building's blue-carpeted press room.

When Portuguese media guides came to the media centre on Friday morning after a pre-summit briefing, they found it littered with copies of a thick and glossy magazine, 'New African,' emblazoned with the face of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.

A 100-page supplement was devoted entirely to Zimbabwe, with a front-page photo of Mugabe demanding land for its people.

Mugabe is a vocal campaigner for land reform, but his policies are credited in Europe with having destroyed Zimbabwe's once-flourishing economy and its fledgling democracy.

European and African states have regularly clashed over the issue, with the EU accusing Mugabe of flagrant human-rights abuses.

The magazine supplement, sponsored by the Zimbabwean Ministry of Information and Publicity, left no doubt as to its sympathies.

It accused Britain's former premier Tony Blair of wanting to invade the country, and said that current Prime Minister Gordon Brown - who boycotted the summit over Mugabe's presence - wanted to 'coil a whip that would make the continent jump into line.'

And the appearance of large numbers of pro-Mugabe magazines - which had not been approved by organizers - in a room under such tight security that even accredited journalists had to queue for an hour to get entry passes left press-centre staff baffled.

Rumours quickly began flying that they had been smuggled in by a member of the Zimbabwean embassy, or even a secret agent.

Within hours, the magazines had disappeared from the news-stands in the press room. Subsequent questioning revealed that they had been 'temporarily withdrawn' while summit officials decided whether they could be counted as genuine news material.

But on Saturday morning a new controversy arose. Opening the press centre well before sunrise, media guides were baffled to find small red paper scratch cards entitled 'Robert Mugabe: for the sake of Zimbabwe, please hang on' lying around the room.

Under each silver scratch-off pad was a picture of a hangman's noose and the internet address of an anti-Mugabe campaign, Zimbabwe Democracy Now.

Summit staff expressed bafflement as to how the cards could have got past security. Some suggested that they must have been hidden in the room before the summit, or carried there in an accredited visitor's possessions.

The scratch cards quickly joined the magazines in the cramped recesses of the summit media coordinator's office, where both documents were subsequently judged to be propaganda materials out of keeping with the spirit of the meeting.

With the summit at an end, the materials are likely to end up side by side in its capacious recycling bins, staff said.

And summit organizers would no doubt be delighted to see the old enemies coming so close together for once in their long dispute.