Straw to meet opposite number in first high-level contact for a year

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The foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, will meet his Zimbabwean counterpart next month, marking the first high-level contact for nearly a year between Britain and its former colony.

But the Nigerian hosts are expected to have their work cut out keeping Zimbabwe at the table. Zimbabwean reports indicate the foreign minister, Stan Mudenge, will come to the 6 September meeting in Abuja with a narrow agenda – the land crisis and Britain's responsibility for it as the country's former colonial ruler.

Britain, on the other hand, wants the issue of land to be tackled in conjunction with the international donor community. It also wants democracy and the respect for law and order to be at the centre of the talks.

A Foreign Office official said yesterday: "We have always recognised the need for land reform and since independence we have contributed £44 million. In 1998, an international land conference in Zimbabwe agreed that land reform had to take place amid sound economic policies and the upholding of the rule of law. But what Mugabe has got going at the moment is basically snatching land, not poverty alleviation."

The international donor community, made up of the European Union, the United States and Japan has walked away from Zimbabwe, after a massive state sponsored upsurge of violence against the opposition, and the seizure of white farmers' land.

On the key issue of land reform – returning land seized by the colonial Rhodesian authorities from poor indigenous blacks – Britain is at odds with Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe said he wanted Britain to pay tens of millions of pounds up front for land reform, while he ensured the pickings went to his cronies. In June, he signalled his willingness to talk to the Commonwealth about land reform but said he did not want "a fixation" on what he called "peripheral matters such as the rule of law, democracy, good governance and political violence."

He said the whole idea was to keep the focus on the colonial legacy which had left Zimbabwe's poor landless and impoverished while the best agricultural land remained with the 4,500 white farmers.

Nevertheless, the mere staging of the meeting – to be attended by eight Commonwealth foreign ministers – marks a significant step forward in attempts to end Zimbabwe's isolation and is a triumph of diplomacy for its brokers, Nigeria and South Africa. It will take place one month exactly, before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane, where Zimbabwe will be present and featuring extensively in discussions.

British diplomats hope the past year – since the former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, briefly met Mr Mudenge at the UN in New York – has led Zimbabwe to understand it is now all but isolated in the world.

It is unlikely a deal on land will be struck in Abuja, or that the meeting will bring peace to Zimbabwe. But if they achieve nothing else, the ministers will at least be able to spell out to Zimbabwe that it is on its own.