The US said on Friday that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.
Zimbabwe has declared an emergency and appealed for international help to battle a cholera outbreak that has killed 575 people, with 12,700 reported cases of the disease, according to the UN.
“It’s well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Copenhagen.
In a further sign of growing international pressure on Zimbabwe, EU diplomats said the bloc planned more sanctions next week unless progress was made in ending a deadlock over how to implement a power-sharing deal.
Nobel laureate and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday that Mugabe had to step down or be removed by force and that he faced indictment for war crimes in The Hague unless he quit.
Rice said the stalled power-sharing talks, a “sham election” earlier this year, economic meltdown and the humanitarian toll from the cholera epidemic required swift action.
“If this is not evidence to the international community that it’s time to stand up for what is right I don’t know what will be,” Rice told a news conference.
Her comments brought an angry riposte from Harare, which said it was not for Washington to pronounce on another country’s president.
“Zimbabwe is a sovereign state and cannot be dictated to by some secretary of state of another country no matter how big,” Zimbabwean Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu told reporters.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband slammed the government as a “rogue” regime, saying the world was watching “with horror” at suffering caused by a government “seemingly so determined to bring misery on its own people.”
South Africa said on Friday that Zimbabwe’s call for international help was encouraging.
“We think that that’s a major breakthrough,” South African government spokesman Themba Maseko said.
Maseko said South Africa, whose former president Thabo Mbeki has been trying to mediate between ZANU-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was sending a high-level delegation to Zimbabwe to assess how it can provide assistance.
Mugabe meanwhile brandished the threat of fresh elections in a bid to force through a stalled power-sharing deal.
As a cholera epidemic in the crisis-wracked country worsened, a defiant Mugabe lashed the opposition MDC for refusing to join a unity government in which he would remain as president.
In an address to his party’s politburo, Mugabe showed he was in no mood to bow to MDC demands to hand over control of the key interior ministry, saying he would call early elections if the two sides could not work together.
“We agreed to give them 13 ministries while we share the ministry of home affairs, but if the arrangement fails to work in the next one-and-a-half to two years, then we would go for elections,” Mugabe was quoted as saying by the Herald, a government newspaper.
Mugabe accused the MDC of trying to destroy the power-sharing agreement.
“The MDC should say no if they do not want to be part of the inclusive government,” said Mugabe, 84, who has ruled the former British colony since independence in 1980.
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