The Sunday Mail
Charity Maodza
THE opposition MDC Alliance has been criticised for its association with a Sri Lankan separatist movement, Tamil Eelam, during the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
The Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) was formed by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, with the aim of creating an independent state, Tamil Eelam, which TGTE aspires to create in the north and east provinces of Sri Lanka.
The TGTE and Tamil Eelam are not recognised by any state or authority. During the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, the MDC-A and it’s surrogate organisations such as the Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation and the Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe, in co-ordination with the Mthwakazi group, staged a poorly attended demonstration which led them to join the Tamil Eelam demonstration in a bid to shore up their numbers. Resultantly, the MDC-A group was seen joining Tamil Eelam’s sloganeering for independence and brandishing their flag, a red coloured flag with a tiger.
The MDC-A has drawn criticism for its support for the separatist movement in a foreign country.
The party’s international relations secretary, Gladys Hlatshwayo, is under fire over her poor appreciation of diplomacy and the impact of association with separatist movements.
The MDC-A’s demonstrating alongside the equally separatist Mthwakazi group has also triggered questions about it’s amenability to break the unitariness of Zimbabwe, in violation of the Constitutionally-enshrined founding principles of the oneness of the country.
A political analyst castigated the MDC-A’s diplomatic blunder, highlighting that “the MDC-A and its surrogates have demonstrated their incompetence on the international stage, associating and chanting separatist slogans of a foreign country they know little about.
They also present a danger of being used by foreign separatist movements to spread the same rhetoric in Zimbabwe, to the detriment of national unity and oneness,” the analyst said.
Thirty two countries currently list the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a terrorist organisation, including the COP26 host, the United Kingdom.
