Strong words

Excerpt from the M&G interview with Patricia de Lille (found via the South Africa blog)

8. If you were the president of South Africa, how would you engage with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe?

Engage? I will not engage with him. I think in South Africa there a moral duty and obligation placed on us. We've just emerged from a very sad past of human rights abuses ... apartheid was declared a crime against humanity.

Therefore it must be our responsibility to condemn the human rights violations taking place in Zimbabwe, and therefore we should not base our foreign policy in South Africa on who used to be our friends in the past.

We must make a distinction between the people of Zimbabwe and the government. My heart goes out for the people of Zimbabwe. For the thousands of displaced farmworkers who have been moved off those farms, black farmworkers [facing] hunger, starvation and homelessness.

So, we must support humanitarian aid. But we should under no condition grant him [Mugabe] a loan if he's not prepared to accept the conditions, which are very reasonable that South Africa is putting to him.

If the economy in Zimbabwe collapses, we are going to pick up the brunt and I don't know how we can avoid that happening because South Africa will surely be very badly affected.

The time for engagement with Zimbabwe is over now. It's time for tough talk and action is needed now.

Quiet diplomacy? It means nothing. Something like that can never exist in an open and free democracy. Thabo Mbeki should take South Africa in his confidence and tell us what he is engaging with. To me, quiet diplomacy says nothing.