Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s peers are losing patience, the top negotiator for the Zimbabwe opposition said on the eve of an extraordinary regional summit called to deal with the southern African nation’s power-sharing deadlock.
Tendai Biti, who has been trying to form a unity government between Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview on Saturday that Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was increasingly surrounded by a new, democratic breed of leader. Biti singled out Botswanan President Seretse Ian Khama, who has condemned state-sponsored political violence in Zimbabwe and called for internationally supervised elections to resolve its leadership crisis.
Mugabe’s long-ruling ZANU-PF party responded by accusing its neighbor Botswana of training militants to overthrow him, charges that Khama and Biti dismissed. Biti said the accusations were the sort of “grandstanding” and “nonsense” Mugabe’s neighbors were no longer prepared to accept.
“With Mugabe, you’re dealing with a very arrogant, very experienced dictator,” Biti said. “You’ve got to deal with Mugabe, first, with courage. Second, you’ve got to have a game plan.”
Increasingly, Biti said, African leaders were bravely saying to Mugabe: “You’re wrong, wake up.”
As for a game plan, Biti said he expected leaders at yesterday’s Southern African Development Community summit in Johannesburg to press for what the opposition sees as a fair division of Cabinet posts in a proposed unity government.
The opposition in particular wants the ministries that control police and finance — posts Mugabe has tried to claim unilaterally for ZANU-PF.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai agreed in September to share power, with Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as prime minister. But the deal has not moved from paper to reality because of the Cabinet dispute, leaving Zimbabweans without leadership as their economy collapses.
Inflation is the highest in the world; health, education and public utility infrastructure is crumbling; and the UN predicts half the population will need food aid by next year.
Biti said Zimbabweans needed an urgent solution, but that they could not expect a dramatic breakthrough at yesterday’s one-day summit.
That did not mean the opposition was ready to abandon the regional bloc’s mediation effort, which has been under way for a year.
“You make progress in small steps,” Biti said.
On Saturday, Human Rights Watch recommended that the leaders meeting yesterday seek more help from the UN and the African Union.
Human Rights Watch has long questioned the strategy of the regional bloc’s mediator, former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki says confronting Mugabe would be counterproductive. But critics say Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy amounts to appeasing a brutal dictator.
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