Miliband slates SA failure to recognise Zimbabwe's crisis

from the Scotsman

DAVID Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, visiting South Africa for talks on the Zimbabwe crisis ahead of the G8 summit in Japan, yesterday started a political row with the president, Thabo Mbeki.

Mr Mbeki has resolutely asserted that there is no crisis in Zimbabwe. But Mr Miliband publicly demonstrated the British government's stark differences with Mr Mbeki by visiting some of the three million refugees who have fled into South Africa from Robert Mugabe's terror campaign – something Mr Mbeki has refused to do, describing the fugitives not as "refugees" but as "temporary shelterers."

Mr Mbeki, whose eight years of "quiet diplomacy" in Zimbabwe on behalf of the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community have come to nothing, returned from yet another failed negotiation in Zimbabwe with his lieutenants blaming Britain for the breakdown.
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