Regards, Ivan
The flag of Rhodesia
Posted on 01/12/2003 4:57:00 PM PST by MadIvan
Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, said last night that he had been involved in secret talks on a power-sharing government with senior figures from Robert Mugabe's regime.
Mr Tsvangirai said a mediator had offered a deal under which Mr Mugabe, who was re-elected last year in elections widely condemned as rigged, would resign and be given immunity from prosecution. Senior Western diplomats said that the offer appeared to be a trap to co-opt the opposition.
Mr Tsvangirai said the offer was made, via the intermediary, by two of the ruling party's most powerful figures - the speaker of the Parliament, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the armed forces chief of staff, Gen Vitalis Zvinavashe.
He said he had not received "categoric assurances" from the full ruling party leadership that Mr Mugabe would resign, but added: "I can only go as far as to say that as far as Mnangagwa and Zvinavashe were concerned, it's part of the deal."
However, Mr Tsvangirai appears to have waited several weeks before telling his colleagues in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) about the meetings, and a number of senior MDC figures believe he has not told them the full details of what he has agreed.
Mr Mugabe has presided over the decline of his country from one of Africa's most prosperous to an economic ruin in which the capital has run out of petrol and millions of people are threatened with starvation.
"It is obvious Mugabe has become a liability to his party and the nation as a whole," Mr Tsvangirai said. The MDC would not insist Mr Mugabe go into exile, he added, and offered to drop his party's long-standing demand that the president be put on trial for alleged misrule.
"Regrettably, we may have said that," he said. "It may have been a position. Circumstances dictate behaviour. The country is on its knees. If people are asked to make that sacrifice of giving him immunity, and to say, 'Let's forget the past and move forward', let it be.
"We have more to lose by getting bogged down until the country collapses and more to gain by saying this is a hurdle we have to overcome."
No one from Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF government was available for comment yesterday, and the president himself, whose early retirement has long seemed unthinkable, was on a two-week holiday. He is due to return to his office today.
A Foreign Office spokesman said they were looking into reports of the negotiations, which remained unconfirmed.
The MDC has previously demanded independently supervised elections after six months of any transitional rule, but Mr Tsvangirai said his party was prepared to support a caretaker government with a longer period in office.
A senior western diplomat in Harare warned the MDC that any offer of "retirement" by Mr Mugabe would be a "set-up".
Harare's mayor, Elias Mudzuri, a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, spent the weekend in jail, accused of illegally addressing ratepayers on water and sewage problems. According to the MDC, he was "savagely mishandled by police" at the meeting in the Mabvuku township east of the city.
Last week Ignatius Chombo, the local government minister, said he was appointing governors to oversee "development" in Harare and in the second city Bulawayo, which also has an elected MDC mayor.
Regards, Ivan
The flag of Rhodesia
That's a big 10-4! Let's hope the opposition has the wisdom to hire some well trained snipers, or whatever it takes to rid their country of this monster.
Shades of Joshua Nkomo and the ZAPU party.
ZAPU was a party mostly comprised of the minority Ndebele people of Matabeleland, but he was a popular figure in the early days of Zimbabwe and a threat to Mugabe's reign, much as is the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai today.
A "government of national unity" was formed and Nkomo was given a high ranking position in it.
But the result was that ZAPU got co-opted and absorbed by ZANU and Zimbabwe became a one-party state.
By the time of his death, Nkomo was widely regarded as a sell-out.
Had he not made the deal, he may never have gained power, especially with the parties being largely on tribal lines, ZANU being largely Shona and ZAPU being largely Ndebele, with the Shona greatly outnumbering the Ndebele. But he and his followers, with his enormous prestige, would have been a constant opposition-in-being, even had Nkomo been killed or driven into exile.
What isn't obvious is, what does the ruling party give up?
Mugabe now has "evidence" that Tsvangirai is trying to carry out a "coup." This gives him what little pretense he needs to start carrying out mass arrests and executions of "treasonous coup-plotters" (everyone in the MDC).
That is the operative sentence in your quotation.
It is my undertanding that, he allowed ZAPU to be co-optd to end the Gukurahunzi against the Ndebeles. He never had any real power in the ZANU-PF government; he was merely a figurehead that Mugabe could keep under his thumb. Mugabe's threats against the MDC and Tsvangirai are Nkomo/ZAPU redux. The only difference is that Mugabe is now operating from a much weakened position, ecomomically and politically as his country is nearing melt-down.
Whether he is behind the overture to the MDC or not, it indicates that that there are those in ZANU-PF who see him as the liability he is and are seeking to save their own skin. I don't trust any of them (ZANU-PF) for reasons you have pointed out.
Someone must have figured out that the world is telling ZIM to take a flying leap.
Or it may be that the top generals are hearing stirrings of a coup from their mid-level officers.
Who knows ? But this indicates a weakness on the part of the ruling party to make this offer.
This idea seems to have suddenly materialized in the air.
I suspect that it is pure manipulation to get the west to back off for a while.
Or perhaps it was just that someone picked the wrong mushrooms.
The only time I ever lived in a country that had a coup was in Libya when young army officers overthrew King Idris when he was out of the country. It may be that reality IS starting to hit home among the elites. Their relatives from the homelands and townships may be showing up on their doorsteps, as Africans are likely to do.
Their children's lives HAVE been disrupted; reports about Comrade Moyo's Christmas holiday notwithstanding, not all of the numerous party members who show up at the annual ZANU Convention are doing well.
The shortage of forex is DESPERATE. Some of the elite are on medication which can only be purchased out-of-country for example (these guys are getting old).
The party HAS in fact been trying to get Mugabe to step down for at least since the fiasco of the constitutional proposals, voted down by the populace, and setting the stage for much of what transpired.
I don't have any secret information, just my own long term relationships with some of these people. It is very difficult to get anyone to be forthcoming as EVERYONE assumes they are being listened to vis a vis phone, and now having their e-mails read.
I hope that the opposition plays this very carefully. My concern about the physical well-being of the people there is beginning to come into conflict with gut instincts on the better political moves for them.
It was, after all, politics that created this mess.
Another thing to always consider, is that I simply cannot get into the heads of people who could justify starving children for political gain.
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