Johannesburg, Harare- Zimbabwe, a week before runoff presidential elections, is on the brink of a "bottomless abyss," according to US Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee, speaking Thursday in the South African capital Pretoria.

"It is a country on the brink of starvation. It has already fallen off the precipice of economic collapse and is sinking into a seemingly bottomless abyss," McGee said at the Centre for International Political Studies at the University of Pretoria.

The US official said that Zimbabwe's political violence as well as mass hunger were "the direct result of a regime that cares more about clinging to power and the personal riches it brings than it does the welfare of its citizens."

McGee discounted upcoming elections, saying that Zimbabwe's "government-directed campaign of violence and intimidation, coupled with planned electoral fraud make a free and faire election impossible."

McGee called upon Zimbabwe's neighbours to put pressure the regime of long-reigning President Robert Mugabe, saying the problems of Zimbabwe had regional effects, and the solutions should also be regional.

Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe, who has been in Zimbabwe as part of an African observer mission, warned Thursday that increasing violence could make a free vote impossible.

Membe, addressing a news conference on behalf of the three Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations monitoring the polls, said he and his colleagues from Angola and Swaziland would appeal to their presidents to take urgent action "so that we can save Zimbabwe", according to a BBC report.

The report quoted hiom as saying: "The first impression we have is that if the elections were to take place today, these elections would never be free and fair.

"The report we received still indicates that violence is escalating throughout Zimbabwe.

"We have received a report that says on the 16th of June this year, as the observers were being deployed to those various stations, two people were shot dead.

"Of course, it scared most of these observers to the extent that they had to pose the question of why are we here then, and what are we doing?"

The latest developments came as the UN Security Council was to hold an informal meeting on Zimbabwe later Thursday, chaired by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had warned Wednesday that repeated acts of intimidation and arrests of opposition leaders would make Zimbabwe's runoff presidential elections less credible unless Harare puts a stop to them,

Ban, addressing ambassadors to the UN at a closed-door session in New York, criticized strongly the political atmosphere while Zimbabwe prepares for runoff elections on June 27.

"The current violence, intimidation and the arrest of opposition leaders are not conducive to credible elections," Ban said. "Should these conditions continue to prevail, the legitimacy of the election outcome would be in question." (dpa)