British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Friday he fully supported South Africa's efforts to mediate in Zimbabwe's escalating political crisis, saying a solution to the stand-off must come from within Africa.
Blair, speaking on the last day of his final African tour as Britain's leader, said South African President Thabo Mbeki and other regional leaders were best placed to press Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe for democratic reforms.
"The only thing that matters is not what I say, or what anybody else says, but what is happening to the people of Zimbabwe," Blair, standing next to Mbeki, said in a press conference in the South African capital Pretoria.
"It is from within Zimbabwe and this region that change has got to come. And what we will do is support people like President Mbeki who are trying to bring about change."
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has delegated Mbeki to mediate the crisis in Zimbabwe, where critics accuse Mugabe of a violent crackdown against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and other political opponents.
Zimbabwe police arrested and badly beat MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and other party officials in March after an aborted prayer rally in Harare. Opposition leaders and rights activists say the repression has continued in the southern African nation.
Mugabe's government accuses the MDC of petrol bomb attacks and other violence as part of a "terror" campaign waged at the behest of Britain and other Western nations opposed to his policy of seizing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks. The 83-year-old Zimbabwean ruler says Britain and its allies are to blame for a deep economic crisis that has led to hyperinflation, soaring poverty and unemployment, and chronic shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency.
Mbeki-who has tried and failed to bring Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF and the MDC to talks in the past-has said he believes the current mediation is going well, although there has as yet been little public sign of progress.
The South African leader said on Friday he had "briefed" Blair on the current state of the mediation efforts but did not give details. Human rights activists and some Western diplomats have reacted cautiously to Mbeki's mediation role, pointing out that he has long been accused of being too soft on Mugabe, who is still regarded as a liberation-era hero in much of Africa.
Blair, however, has been one of Mugabe's harshest critics and a strong supporter of the financial and travel sanctions that a group of Western nations have imposed on Mugabe and other senior Zimbabwean officials.
In a speech on Thursday, the British leader said it was important to find a solution to Zimbabwe's problems before the country holds elections next year in which Mugabe will be standing for a new five-year term.
Mugabe, Zimbabwe's sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, underscored the tensions this week when he told a graduating class of police officers that their main task was to thwart those engaging in crimes of political violence.
"I wish to call upon people of Zimbabwe to unite against the shameless British arm-twisting tactics being orchestrated through the MDC and the so-called civil groups," the official Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying.
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