Zimbabwe’s embattled opposition leader said on Thursday he has faith in talks with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government, saying negotiations are the only way to end a crisis that has brought his nation “to its knees.”
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai spoke to reporters in Senegal’s capital, where he met with Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and urged him to help find a peaceful settlement.
Despite obstacles he declined to name, Tsvangirai said he was “fairly satisfied” with power-sharing negotiations that began last week, adding they might continue past a two-week deadline.
“In the spirit of trying to quickly resolve the plight of our people, we have put faith in the only solution where we don’t have guns to fight, the only solution that will see a settlement arrived at in the best interests of the people,” Tsvangirai told reporters. “Every conflict at some stage has to end up at the negotiating table and ... it is our assessment that the moment for negotiations is now.”
Tsvangirai, who won the most votes in March elections, withdrew from a June runoff against Mugabe after weeks of military-orchestrated violence left dozens of his supporters dead, thousands severely beaten and thousands more homeless. The 84-year-old Mugabe has held power since independence in 1984.
After a July 21 agreement, power-sharing talks began last week in South Africa. But they soon deadlocked over Mugabe’s insistence he lead any unity government and over what position Tsvangirai should hold in a new administration, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a media blackout.
Tsvangirai said the talks did not explicitly aim to settle who gets top posts, but “whatever arrangements are made about positions and allocations, it has ... to consider the will of the people.”
Tsvangirai said: “In any negotiations there are bound to be obstacles on the road to finding a common ground.”
Though suspended on Tuesday, talks are set to resume tomorrow.
Tsvangirai revealed on Wednesday he met with Mugabe over dinner last week. On Thursday, he said the two discussed “what we as leaders should do to resolve that crisis.”
“What did I feel in shaking hands [with Mugabe]? It was quite an experience,” said Tsvangirai, who has been accused of treason, beaten and survived assassination attempts by Mugabe loyalists. “When you meet for the first time after 10 years, there is always a tendency of feeling this one has got horns, this one has spears and all that. But I’m sure that you can’t have one-and-a-half hours of dinner shouting at each other.”
“I think for him it was quite an experience,” Tsvangirai said. “He found out what kind of man I am, I found out what kind of a man he is.”
Tsvangirai looked down and chuckled briefly, but did not respond when a journalist asked: “And what is the kind of a man is he?”
Tsvangirai gave few details of the rare meeting, but said he and Mugabe “agree totally” on the need for land reform.
Zimbabwe’s trials began nearly a decade ago when white farmers, then the driving force of the economy, started supporting Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe sent supporters to violently invade white-owned farms, saying he was reclaiming ancestral lands for poor black peasants.
Instead, the land went to Mugabe’s Cabinet ministers and generals, who left the fields untended. Hundreds of thousands of farm laborers lost their jobs and homes. Today, a third of Zimbabwe’s people depend on foreign food aid.
“We discussed the issue. And contrary to his own perception that I was opposed to land reform, I actually said: ‘Look, we are the ones who said that land reform is an unfinished national agenda and that for 10 years he had set it aside without even looking back at it,’” Tsvangirai said.
Land reform cannot be the replacement of “4,000 whites with 4,000 black elites,” Tsvangirai said. “It is about dealing with land hunger. It is about dealing with an economic asset.”
Zimbabwe, he said, “must again restore its position as the breadbasket of southern Africa, not be a basket case where it is today.”
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