Pretoria - Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders have urged Zimbabwe's national unity government to achieve more rapid progress towards free and fair elections.
The leaders, who discussed the Zimbabwe situation at their extraordinary meeting in Sandton, also urged Zimbabwe to speed up the implementation of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), which was signed in 2009 by President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
SADC instructed the troika, which includes President Jacob Zuma, mediator for SADC in Harare, to assign a team to work with Zimbabwean officials on issues including preparations for elections. The organisation hoped to see a road map to elections by its next summit in August.
The final communiqu, declared that the summit "encouraged the parties to the GPA to move faster in the implementation of the GPA and create a conducive environment to the holding of elections that will be free and fair under conditions of a level playing field."
The MDC factions and other stakeholders were pushing for delayed elections, while ZANU-PF had been calling for elections this year.
SADC leaders also endorsed the Livingstone Report, presented by Zuma, which expressed its unhappiness with the slow pace of implementing the GPA.
On Madagascar, the leaders called for the return of all political exiles, another step towards returning Madagascar to constitutional rule.
The summit also agreed that the roadmap to end a political crisis and hold elections, proposed by its mediator, should be signed by all parties after some changes. But the communiqu, did not clarify what the changes were.
Former Malagasy Marc Ravalomanana has been in exile in South Africa since 2009 after being ousted as president by Andry Rajoelina. The SADC roadmap proposes that Rajoelina stay as head of a transitional administration until elections.
