[Of course the USA will do nothing… because Zimbabwe is a BLACK country… and Black people are EXEMPT from all the standards and decency which apply to everyone else on the planet. The US Govt’s attitude towards Zimbabwe is pathetic, given that the USA helped to put Mugabe in power – and disregarded our concerns about this violent megalomaniac. Jan]

Johannesburg – The United States did not threaten to invade Zimbabwe when it labelled President Robert Mugabe’s regime an “outpost of tyranny”, the US ambassador said in Johannesburg on Thursday.

In last month’s speech to the US Congress, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice named Zimbabwe alongside Iran, Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea and Belarus as outposts of tyranny.

But on Thursday US Ambassador to South Africa, Jendayi Frazer said: “We do not seek to install a US-style democracy in Zimbabwe or anywhere else for that matter.

“The United States has no fight, no right, no desire and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else,” she said in an address on US foreign policy in Africa at the SA Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.

Frazer said Rice’s comments on Zimbabwe were “not to threaten an invasion”. Rice’s comments were “a statement of fact” about the way in which Mugabe’s government treated its people, she said.

“The United States will continue to stand with the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle to return democracy to their country,” Frazer said.

The placing of Zimbabwe on Washington’s list of six renegade countries has drawn criticism from President Thabo Mbeki, who said Rice’s comments discredited her country’s proclaimed policy of promoting political freedom around the world.

Mbeki disagrees

“I think it’s an exaggeration,” Mbeki said in this week’s interview with London’s Financial Times.

“I think that whatever (the US) government wants to do with regard to that list of six countries, or however many, I think it’s really somewhat discredited,” Mbeki said.

On Thursday Frazer said Mbeki’s view, which he explained to Frazer immediately after making them, was that “Zimbabwe is not a tyranny like the other countries in the category”.

“We would not agree with that. We think that Zimbabwe and the Zanu-PF government have created a repressive environment in which there is no level playing field.

“From the lead-up to the 2002 election through to today, the opposition cannot operate freely, they still have laws … that would not allow people to have freedom of assembly…

“We would call it an environment of tyranny and repression. We will agree to disagree,” Frazer said.

The US supported governments that answered to their citizens and respected basic, fundamental human rights.

“Where we see human rights abuses, we will say so publicly. We will speak out and we will speak out loudly,” she said.

Source: News24.Com
URL: http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/Zimbabwe/…/p>