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Zimbabwe: Elections

My Lords, I am sure that the noble Earl is right: there are certainly more Chinese than British citizens in Africa. I therefore suspect that there are more Chinese in Zimbabwe. There are 1 million Chinese in Africa today. On the second point, it is worth saying that President Mugabe was not in Europe on a state visit to a European capital; he was there under the same provision which has allowed Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and President Ahmadinejad to go to UN headquarters in New York at a time when they were not on good terms with the United States. It is just part of the terms and conditions—the agrément—of UN offices. As a membership organisation available to all countries, the heads or official representatives of those countries can travel through the national territory of the country where the UN headquarters is located to attend a meeting. So please do not believe that there was support in that case. At the EU Lisbon meeting at the end of last year, there was a judgment that letting him come was a lower profile way of handling the situation than having a confrontation around it. It was not necessarily a judgment we shared, which is why our Prime Minister did not attend the meeting.