Posted on 01/25/2004 6:35:06 AM PST by Clive
Harare - Zimbabwe's main political parties have pleaded ignorance after Nigerian and South African leaders said President Robert Mugabe had agreed to talks with the opposition on resolving the country's political crisis.
For many observers in Zimbabwe confidence that the discussions which ended abruptly in 2002 would be resumed would come only when they heard it from Mugabe himself.
"President Mugabe needs to formally announce, to the people of Zimbabwe, that dialogue is to take place," Movement for Democratic Change information secretary Paul Themba Nyathi said.
Didymus Mutasa, external affairs secretary for Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party, said: "President Mugabe has not said anything and neither has (MDC leader) Morgan Tsvangirai. We might be told at our monthly party meeting next Wednesday, but as far as we know now, there is nothing."
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, echoing earlier comments by President Thabo Mbeki, told reporters in London on Friday that Mugabe's Zanu-PF was ready to resume formal dialogue with the opposition MDC.
Zanu-PF walked out of talks in 2002 after the MDC went to court to challenge Mugabe's re-election in a poll it and several international observers said was rigged.
The ruling party had said it would not resume formal dialogue until the MDC's legal challenge was dropped, a condition the MDC said it could not honour.
In a sign relations remain less than congenial, the MDC said police had raided its headquarters in Harare in search of subversive material and confiscated party documents in what it called "a setback towards creating an environment conducive for meaningful inter-party dialogue".
Police were not immediately available for comment.
Mugabe insists he won the 2002 elections fairly and has labelled the MDC a puppet of Western powers who want to see him ousted over his seizure of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution among landless blacks.
The Mbeki and Obasanjo have been advocating talks (and periodically asserting, incorrectly, that talks are actually taking place) almost since the beginning of the farm invasions in 2000.
They are pushing the idea of a "government of national unity", which is Africa's standard method for co-opting and marginalizing and eventually eliminating a troublesome opposition.
Tsvangirai is not swallowing it. He has only to look to the precedence of Joshua Nkomo to see what will happen.
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