Revealed: UN & US plot to oust Zimbabwe leader

Diplomatic cables leaked by the whistle blowing website Wikileaks have confirmed that western leaders were supportive of a plot to oust Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.

The leak lends credence to Mugabe’s allegations that there was a plot to remove him supported by Western leaders.

According to classified US documents, a coup in the southern African country would have been supported by the UN secretary general.

A group of exiled Zimbabwean businessmen proposed in 2007 that Mugabe could be persuaded to hand over executive power to a prime minister before leaving office completely three years later. American officials welcomed the idea, noting that it was "increasingly in circulation" in the capital, Harare, and "may not require outside intervention".

The plot did not come to fruition.

Details were included in a confidential memo from the US embassy in South Africa dated 30 January 2007. The cable names a group of prominent Zimbabwean businessmen living in South Africa who were pushing for change but says their leader's identity should be "strictly protected".

A power sharing deal was struck between Mugabe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in 2008 but Zimbabwe’s economic climate remains tenuous.

Another leaked diplomatic cable reveals just what US officials thought of another poverty struck African state: Eritrea.

In a secret cable written last year, the then US ambassador to Eritrea, Ronald McMullen goes to great lengths to describe the ‘awful’ conditions in Eritrea.

"Young Eritreans are fleeing their country in droves, the economy appears to be in a death spiral, Eritrea's prisons are overflowing, and the country's unhinged dictator remains cruel and defiant," he wrote.

There were further suggestions that president Isaias Afwerki may have been ‘mentally unhinged’ but he remained in power because of Eritreans fierce sense of nationalism.

The leaking of the diplomatic cables has sparked an intense backlash from US authorities.