Full-scale talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s months-long political crisis are now expected to begin in South Africa today, a report in state media said yesterday.
Zimbabwean Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, chief negotiator for President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, told the Herald it had been agreed with the opposition to begin the talks only when all the delegates were in place.
“All parties to the dialogue agreed that talks should begin on Thursday,” he told the daily.
The talks had initially been due to begin on Tuesday but Chinamasa said that all the delegates should now arrive in South Africa by the end of yesterday and would then “travel to the venue for the talks, wherever that would be.”
Chinamasa and ZANU-PF’s other senior negotiator Nicholas Goche stayed in Harare on Tuesday to attend a Cabinet meeting while opposition officials also delayed their travel plans.
A source in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said its top negotiator Tendai Biti had flown out of Harare yesterday but it was not known whether the party’s Bulawayo-based chairman Lovemore Moyo had left.
Mugabe, main MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, head of a breakaway opposition faction, penned a memorandum of understanding on Monday to pave the way for talks.
“This is just the first step on a journey whose duration and success is dependent on the sincerity and good faith of all parties involved,” Tsvangirai said in a statement Tuesday.
Although the venue of the talks has been kept under wraps, the negotiations are expected to take place in Pretoria. The rivals have set themselves a tight two-week timeline to wrap up the talks aimed at agreeing on the line-up of a new government.
Mugabe was re-elected in a one-man run-off last month after Tsvangirai pulled out, citing a campaign of intimidation and violence against his supporters that had killed dozens and injured thousands. The vote was widely condemned in the West as a sham, with the EU warning that it would not deal with a government unless headed by Tsvangirai.
EU foreign ministers agreed in Brussels to strengthen sanctions against Mugabe as a means of pressuring him to agree to share power with the opposition — a sign the West plans to keep the pressure on Mugabe.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Monday’s face-to-face meeting between Mugabe and Tsvangirai — their first in 10 years — was only “a first step,” and that EU nations were expecting more proof that Mugabe was willing to sign up to a transitional government with the opposition.
Also See: A screwdriver, not a hammer, could help to heal Zimbabwe
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS