African leaders to hold talks on Zimbabwe

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Earlier, Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai urged the United Nations to isolate President Robert Mugabe and said a peacekeeping force was needed in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe has shrugged off Monday's unprecedented and unanimous decision by the U.N. Security Council to condemn violence against the opposition and declare that a free and fair presidential election on Friday was impossible.

The Mbabane meeting has been called by the leading regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), amid mounting international pressure on Mugabe to resolve his country's political turmoil and economic meltdown.

The leaders of Tanzania, Angola and Swaziland would attend the meeting in their capacity as the SADC's troika organ on politics, defence and security, the Tanzanian government said in a statement.

"Others who have been invited to attend the meeting are the current SADC chairman, (President) Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia, and the SADC mediator for Zimbabwe, (President) Thabo Mbeki of South Africa," said the statement.

"The meeting will discuss how the SADC and its troika organ on politics, defence and security can help Zimbabwe to get out of its current state of conflict."

Tsvangirai, who has withdrawn from the election and taken refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare since Sunday, said Zimbabwe would "break" if the world did not come to its aid.

"We ask for the U.N. to go further than its recent resolution, condemning the violence in Zimbabwe, to encompass an active isolation of the dictator Mugabe," Tsvangirai wrote in an article in the Guardian.

"For this we need a force to protect the people. We do not want armed conflict, but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force," said Tsvangirai.

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