Zimbabwe explains why Carter was blocked on humanitarian mission
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe said it blocked Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter and a South African human-rights support from visiting on a humanitarian mission because they had not properly consulted through officials before the trip, a state-run newspaper reported Sunday.
The ex-U.N. secretary-general, the ex-U.S. president and rights advocate Graca Machel, who is married to Nelson Mandela, said Saturday they were denied visas because of a mission to assess the of necessity of Zimbabweans, frequent of whom suffer from hunger and ailment.
Instead, they spent the weekend in Johannesburg, South Africa, convention with representatives of aid agencies, Zimbabwean civil-society organizations and national parties.
The three are members of The Elders, a group Mandela formed to foster peace and pulley world conflicts.
Annan had said Saturday that Zimbabwe gave no magistrate reason for refusing them visas for the mission, which they insisted was entirely detached from regional attempts to get President Robert Mugabe and his rivals to implement a power-sharing agreement.
Foreign minister Samuel Mumbengegwi accused Annan of “misrepresenting the facts” about the aborted trip and criticized the form into groups conducive to launching the mission, according to the newspaper.
He also said the clump would have had difficulty conducting a meaningful assessment, afterwards the government had already completed its own “humanitarian audit” in conjunction with U.N. agencies based in the country, the paper reported.
No details of that program have been made available, and Mumbengegwi did not name any of the U.N. agencies in the newspaper report.
On Thursday, Zimbabwe’s Herald state newspaper before-mentioned the group was asked to “come at a later date” to accommodate the crop-planting season.
