UNITED NATIONS, April 29 (Reuters) - African diplomacy has failed to persuade President Robert Mugabe to accept defeat in Zimbabwe's elections and the international community must step in, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change said on Tuesday.
MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti criticized South Africa for upholding the status quo in Zimbabwe and called for a U.N. envoy to be sent to the country and for the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution on the crisis.
A presidential election was held on March 29 in the economically crippled country but no result has so far been announced. Zimbabwe's state radio said on Tuesday verification of the results would start on Thursday.
The wait for the result has led to a tense standoff and drawn accusations from the MDC that Mugabe, who has been in power for 28 years, is trying to rig the result.
"It's been four weeks since the election. What has African diplomacy done?" Biti told Reuters in an interview at the United Nations, where the Security Council discussed Zimbabwe on Tuesday.
Biti said he hoped the Security Council would ask U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to send an envoy to Zimbabwe as a sign of "the internationalization of this crisis."
"The briefing is important in that it's an acknowledgment that there's a crisis but we hope this meeting lays the firm foundation for a future formal meeting on Zimbabwe very soon in which there should be a resolution on Zimbabwe," he said.
"We're also hoping that as soon as possible the secretary-general can dispatch an envoy to Zimbabwe to deal with the issues of violence and the issues of the humanitarian crisis."
He suggested the envoy could be Anna Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian U.N. official who visited Zimbabwe three years ago to investigate a government drive to demolish shantytowns.
African leaders have come under international pressure to take strong action to help resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe, a former British colony whose economy is in ruins, beset with 165,000 percent inflation and mass unemployment.
"There are good people in Africa," Biti said, citing Botswana, Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and others as helpful countries. "But there are also very powerful people there that are defending the status quo, possibly one country... As a result we have a paralysis of action."
He said South Africa was "playing a role that's defending the status quo, a role that's defending the regime."
"We've not been happy with the position of South Africa," he said, likening Pretoria's policy of "quiet diplomacy" toward Zimbabwe to countries that engaged with the apartheid regime in South Africa before its demise.
The MDC says it won the elections, that a recount was illegal and that it will reject the results.
Biti said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission was discredited and whatever it announced was irrelevant.
"The focus as far as we're concerned should not be on the result," he said. "The focus should be on asking Mugabe to step down."
Biti said he hoped to meet ambassadors of the 15 members of the Security Council during his visit to New York and might also travel to Washington later this week.
