Mugabe in a tight spot and running from Raila

Mozambique: Guebuza Wants Negotiations in Zimbabwe

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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
2 July 2008Posted to the web 2 July 2008
Sharm el Sheikh
Mozambican President Armando Guebuza has joined the call for negotiations between Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Speaking to Mozambican reporters on Tuesday, and summarising the discussions at the heads of state summit of the African Union (AU), held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh, Guebuza said the two sides needed to sit at the negotiating table and decide how Zimbabwe was to be governed.
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"SADC (Southern African Development Community) is urging the parties to come together rapidly and negotiate the terms of governance", he declared. He added that SADC also lamented the violence and deaths that had occurred, but wanted to look at "positive aspects" so that stability could be restored in Zimbabwe.
Guebuza said that SADC is concerned at the situation in Zimbabwe, and will continue to work on all aspects of the matter, prior to the next SADC summit, due to be held in August in Lusaka. He added that in the meeting he had held with ZANU-PF leader Robert Mugabe, whose claim to the Zimbabwean president has been disputed across the world, Mugabe had shown openness towards putting SADC decisions into practice.
SADC executive secretary Tomas Salomao said a range of concerns arose from the reports of African electoral observer missions. The missions of the African Union, the Pan-African Parliament and of SADC itself, all regarded the second round of the presidential election, held last Friday, as deeply flawed.
The mayhem imposed on the country by ZANU-PF militias was such that MDC presidential candidate Motganm Tsvangirai, who defeated Mugabe in the first round, on 29 March, felt he had no choice but to pull out from the race in an attempt to prevent the continued murder of his supporters.
The most vigorous statement came from the Pan-African Parliament observers who said the election campaign was "marred by high levels of intimidation, violence, displacement of people, abductions and loss of life", and that the security forces had shown "overt support for the ruling party". Faced with the condemnation of the election by all three African missions, the question for the AU summit, said Salomao, was "what to do at regional and continental level to ensure that a sustainable solution is found".
He said the scenario for Zimbabwe now taking shape is that of the formation of a government of national unity. Salomao warned that, even though he was declared the winner of Friday's elections, Mugabe cannot govern without the MDC. "To approve legal instruments, the President has to get them through parliament, where the opposition has a majority", Salomao pointed out.
So if Zimbabwe was to embark on the path of reconstruction and economic stabilization, then a format would have to be found giving the opposition an active role in these tasks.
But one member of SADC has taken a much stronger position. Botswana called for Mugabe to be suspended from both the AU and SADC. The Botswanan delegation at Sharm el Sheikh circulated a statement from the country's Deputy President, Mompati Merafhe, declaring "In our considered view, the representatives of the current government in Zimbabwe should be excluded from attending SADC and African Union meetings", since Mugabe's participation in such meetings "would give unqualified legitimacy to a process which cannot be considered legitimate".
Botswana's position is particularly important because the SADC headquarters are in Botswana. Its current president, Ian Khama, is the son of Seretse Khama, who led Botswana to independence, and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of SADCC (Southern African Development Coordination Conference), the predecessor of SADC.
From Nairobi, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga also called for Mugabe to be thrown out of the AU. This led to an intemperate outburst from Mugabe's spokesperson George Chiramba who claimed "Odinga's hands drip with blood, raw African blood. And that blood is not going to be cleansed by any amount of abuse of Zimbabwe. Not at all,"
Chiramba was referring to the violence that followed Kenya's election earlier this year. But far from Odinga inciting the violence, most credible reports say that the election was stolen by his rival Mwai Kibaki. The statistics indicate that most of those who died in the Kenyan violence were shot by the police.
Chiramba also appeared to reject a government of national unity. In Kenya, the crisis ended with a deal whereby Kibaki retained the presidency, but Odinga became Prime Minister. Chiramba specifically ruled this out for Zimbabwe. "I don't know what power-sharing is," Charamba said. "Kenya is Kenya, Zimbabwe is Zimbabwe."
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Meanwhile the economic meltdown in Zimbabwe is accelerating. On Tuesday a bottle of beer in Harare cost 15 billion Zimbabwe dollars. That's s not a misprint, that really is 15 with nine zeros after it. The currency devalues sharply every day. The money transfer services through which Zimbabweans in the diaspora send funds to their families on Wednesday quoted one US dollar at slightly more than 53 billion zimdollars, and suggested that their clients ought to send their relatives fuel coupons rather than cash.
The vast number of zeros in the currency creates problems for bank's computer programmes that were not designed to handle trillions or quadrillions of zimdollars. The Zimbabwean Reserve Bank is thus considering slashing six zeros off the currency, so that a billion dollars would become a thousand.
But when three zeros were removed from the currency two years ago, the relief was short lived. Such is the Zimbabwean inflation rate that within a few months the zeros were back and more had to be added, as the pace of inflation increased. The Zimbabwean authorities have not issued official inflation figures over the past couple of months, but some economisst put inflation at several million per cent per annum.