Blair calls for new Mugabe sanctions

Tony Blair was today poised to lead international calls for fresh sanctions against Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe declared himself the winner of the country's tainted presidential elections.

The Prime Minister and President George Bush were ready to demand new action to reinforce Zimbabwe's status as a pariah nation. Mr Blair has begun discussions with world leaders over the issue, talks which will continue today as he travels to a European Union summit in Barcelona.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, meanwhile, was telling MPs this afternoon of Britain's response to the elections, which featured violence and claims of ballot rigging.

The EU is expected to extend its "targeted" sanctions, which currently include frozen assets and a travel ban on Mugabe and 19 of his henchmen, to a larger number of his allies. However, the West's influence is limited after a group of Southern African nations declared polling "free and fair", starkly contradicting reports of massive intimidation and thuggery.

Hopes that the Commonwealth would suspend the country are fading because the three-country panel which would make such a decision includes South Africa and Nigeria - both of whose observers were among those claiming the election was fair. Last week, Mr Blair said the Commonwealth's credibility would suffer a huge blow if it failed to suspend Zimbabwe in the wake of a report by the organisation's observers.

This has yet to be received by Commonwealth chiefs.

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, heavily-armed soldiers and riot police threw a ring of steel around the country's major cities after Mugabe's re-election.

More than 2,000 opposition supporters were in jail for the "crime" of having helped Moran Tsvangirai's campaign as party agents, monitors and their backers in a politically-motivated crackdown condemned by Amnesty International.

With Africa on a collision course with the West, the continent's leaders poured congratulations on Mugabe, 78, after a twoyear campaign in which the principal message seemed to be "vote Mugabe or die".

Namibia called the election "watertight, without room for rigging" and Nigerian observers said they had seen nothing that threatened the integrity of the poll. An observer team from the Organisation of African Unity called the poll "transparent, credible, free and fair".

The South African observer mission said that it believed that the elections were "legitimate". One of the teams members said: "We get the impression that the Western media wanted this election more than the people of Zimbabwe".

One Western diplomat in Harare was so angry that he accused African observers of a " blackwash" and warned that relations between donors in the West and their clients in Africa "will come under heavy strain".