ROME — So what's wrong with a man accused of starving his people attending a global summit on world hunger?
Plenty, say several of the leaders who find themselves joining Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe here for a three-day crisis meeting on the soaring prices of food.
"It is obscene," said Douglas Alexander, Britain's international development secretary and the head of its delegation. Alexander told BBC radio Monday that he would refuse to acknowledge Mugabe, saying the president's "profound misrule" condemned millions of Zimbabweans to dependence on food aid for survival.
Despite a European Union travel ban imposed on Mugabe more than five years ago, he flew into Rome on Sunday night and under police escort was whisked to a fancy hotel on the city's Via Veneto, famed symbol of la dolce vita.
Officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, which is sponsoring the conference, said they could not block Mugabe's attendance because EU restrictions do not extend to a U.N. venue. (Mugabe similarly wiggled around the travel ban with Italian acquiescence when he attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005. The ceremony took place in the Vatican, a city-state not part of the EU, even though Mugabe flew into Italy, which is a member.)
Approximately 40 heads of state or government are expected in Rome this week for the FAO summit, which is aimed at confronting the spread of world hunger amid sharp increases in food costs. Officials blame a daunting convergence of factors, from record prices for fuel to bad harvests exacerbated by climate change, for making food unavailable or unaffordable to a vast, globe-spanning community of already poor people.
Critics regard Mugabe's presence as especially provocative because of what they see as his role in plunging his once bountiful nation into economic chaos. In what he portrayed as a reform program, Mugabe seized thousands of white-owned farms that he said would go to landless blacks but ended up, critics charge, in the hands of his cronies, who allowed them to waste away.
His arrival here followed arrests over the weekend of two prominent opposition figures in Zimbabwe, the latest in a bloody crackdown on opponents before and after March 29 elections that Mugabe lost to Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change. But the margin of Tsvangirai's victory was not sufficient to avoid a runoff, scheduled for June 27.
