Analysis: Final straw for the EU

Mugabe is seeking to extend his 22-year rule

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels had had enough.

They had warned Robert Mugabe that if he failed to allow their election observers to do their job, if he refused to give the international media access to report the campaign or if human rights got any worse in Zimbabwe, then they would impose targeted sanctions.

With supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, finding it ever harder to campaign in safety, they have effectively found Mr Mugabe guilty on all three counts.

The final straw for the EU was the expulsion of Pierre Schori, head of the EU observer mission to Zimbabwe. Back in Brussels he explained why the EU observers had to be pulled back.

"The secret service monitored us. The immigrations authorities were aggressive and penetrated our offices," he said.

"There was an atmosphere of fear. There were daily attacks on our member governments which made for an atmosphere of unpredictability, new laws affecting the media and restricting the freedom of speech.

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"So we concluded with sadness that the work could not be done."

EU Commissioner Chris Patten said that the EU had no quarrel with the people of Zimbabwe and would have liked to have stayed, but had to consider its own credibility.

"The problem we had was whether or not we could run an election observer team adequately and we were getting more and more interference from Mr Mugabe and the interior ministry and the immigration ministry and so on so we weren't able to run a credible operation."

But leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe said the EU mission was too late anyway .

Tendai Biti, international affairs spokesman, said: "The election is not being conducted by an independent electoral commission . For starters we don't have access to the media. The electoral roll is in a mess. So it's already an unequal system and I don't think election observers would have done anything much to ameliorate or mitigate the situation.

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"So we're just going to battle it out like we battled it out in the year 2000."

EU leaders had been faced with a dilemma. In the face of Mr Mugabe's provocations they had been willing to bend over backwards to keep some observers in Zimbabwe in the hope of lessening violence and intimidation.

But they weren't prepared to lie down and have Mr Mugabe trample over them.

They knew their credibility was at stake and the expulsion of Mr Schori proved a provocation too far. Now much responsibility will fall on observers from the Commonwealth and from other African countries.