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Zimbabwe Elections

I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for advance notice of his statement and we very much welcome what he has had to say. He is absolutely right that over the past few weeks Robert Mugabe's regime has reached new heights of brutality and disregard for the people of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is heading for total collapse. It is clear that free and fair elections would have been impossible under those circumstances, so we can all fully understand and respect the decision taken by the MDC to pull out of the election. Does the Foreign Secretary agree that under the UN principle of responsibility to protect, the international community now has a duty to act? Is he concerned that SADC's chairman, the President of Zambia, recently described the silence of that organisation over the elections as ““scandalous””? Is the Foreign Secretary doing all he can to remind SADC countries, particularly South Africa, of the principles on which that organisation is founded, namely respect for democracy and human rights? In the absence of a free and fair second round of elections, the Foreign Secretary is right to say that the result of the first round must be taken to express the will of the Zimbabwean people. Does he not agree, too, that the Zimbabwean Parliament should be allowed to meet unmolested to express its will on the matter? The demands that we must now make are clear. The violence must stop and either the elections must be rescheduled with a massive international presence or a Government of national unity should be formed under Morgan Tsvangirai. In order to ensure that those demands are met, are the Government willing to take three further steps on a temporary basis until the regime complies? First, will they act to stop the remittances that provide the hard foreign currency that sustains the regime in power? Secondly, will they pressure the Governments of South Africa and Mozambique to be willing to restrict or cut off the supply of electricity to Zimbabwe? Thirdly, will they exceptionally allow asylum seekers from Zimbabwe to work in this country should they seek refuge here? Those are drastic steps but they would remove the only resources that now sustain this evil regime. The Government must show now that they are prepared to take such steps.