Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 19, 2008
JOHANNESBURG, April 18 -- For two tantalizing days, Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, believed he was on the verge of becoming president. Results posted publicly after the March 29 vote clearly favored him. The ruling party was visibly split. And a top cabinet official for President Robert Mugabe had come forward, seeking negotiations for a smooth transition.
Then, after an initial round of secret talks just days after the election, an electrifying piece of news filtered back to Tsvangirai through his representatives: A cabinet minister told them that Mugabe had accepted defeat.
Tsvangirai recounted this moment with a hint of despair in an interview with The Washington Post and Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper in a Johannesburg suburb to which he fled soon after the election. He said he was confident that Mugabe, 84, who has ruled Zimbabwe since its founding in 1980, was ready to step aside, that a nation with chronic food shortages, the world's worst inflation and a devastating flight of talent was poised for a turnaround.
The main demand from the ruling party side was amnesty for Mugabe for past misdeeds and modest representation for his party in a transitional government, Tsvangirai said. There was also a request that Mugabe be allowed to maintain a powerless figurehead position within the government, but the opposition refused, said Tsvangirai's spokesman, George Tshibotshiwa.
"The parameters were that we had won the election, that we would incorporate" Mugabe's party in the government, Tsvangirai said of the discussions. "But it would be by our own choice. And that Mugabe can exit honorably, but he has to concede defeat."
But what came next was not a public concession by Mugabe but a suddenly fierce determination to fight back.
The cabinet member, Labor Minister Nicholas Goche, mysteriously failed to appear for a third day of scheduled talks, Tsvangirai said. Soon after, police, soldiers and youth militias deployed; opposition activists were arrested, beaten and tortured by the dozens. A close-knit group of military and security officials, according to many sources, took day-to-day control of much of the government, including preparations for a runoff election that Mugabe's party abruptly said was necessary -- even though initial election results had not been announced.
"We knew that we were talking to moderates within" Mugabe's party, said Jameson Timba, one of Tsvangirai's two lead envoys, speaking from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. "So when the talks did not proceed, we knew that the hawks, the hard-liners, had taken over."
Speaking in a drab office park here, in a small, glass-walled conference room with little more than a table, some chairs and a water cooler, Tsvangirai said he plans to return to Zimbabwe in several days but expressed concern about what awaits him there.
"Do you want a dead hero?" said Tsvangirai, a former union leader.
As the political crisis approaches the three-week mark, it has settled into a grim stalemate. Mugabe's party, after initially acknowledging that it had lost control of parliament and got fewer votes for president as well, has taken control of the electoral mechanisms. Police have arrested election officials, and the ruling party has challenged results in swing districts and has halted the official release of the presidential results, even though the totals for individual precincts have been posted across the country since the day after the vote.
Goche did not answer numerous telephone calls Friday night.
Tsvangirai's account, though impossible to entirely verify, fits roughly with descriptions offered over the past three weeks by numerous other sources, including some within the ruling party, the opposition and the military.
Those other interviews, most of which were conducted on the condition of anonymity, made clear that Mugabe acknowledged his loss to several members of his inner circle and that a significant faction urged him to step down. The decisive resistance to that idea came from the nation's highest military and security leaders, who refused to support a government led by Tsvangirai, who had no role in the guerrilla war that led to the fall of the white supremacist government of Rhodesia.
Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change have repeatedly claimed victory in the election but have offered no plausible plan for taking power. A general strike flopped Tuesday. Unprecedented diplomatic efforts, including an emergency summit among southern African regional leaders last weekend, have failed so totally that Tsvangirai has called for South African President Thabo Mbeki, the region's traditional heavyweight, to be removed from his lead role in resolving the standoff.
Zimbabwe's meltdown is having political consequences across southern Africa. Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC) has become so frustrated with his deferential approach to Mugabe that party leaders have publicly broken from their long-standing policy of "quiet diplomacy" and are attempting to organize their own negotiations directly with Zimbabwe's two major political parties.
The ANC's treasurer general, Mathews Phosa, in an interview Friday, called Mugabe "an embarrassment." About Mbeki, Phosa was nearly as blunt, saying "Mbeki's one of our cadres," a term that refers to party foot soldiers who take orders from the ANC leadership. "He must listen to us."
The long-unified Southern African Development Community has split sharply over how to manage Mugabe's flaunting of the democratic principles the group espouses. Zambia, whose President Levy Mwanawasa heads the group, reportedly has pushed for a hard line against Mugabe, with the support of Botswana and Malawi. Mozambique, Angola and South Africa have resisted, according to accounts of an emergency meeting last weekend.
For the southern African region accustomed to showing a unified face, Tsvangirai said with a laugh, "to even disagree is progress."
Yet he spoke harshly of Mbeki's role.
"Our people are being brutalized at the moment. Not a word of condemnation," Tsvangirai said. "How does he hope that our people will feel? . . . We're facing an extraordinary situation here, and he is keeping quiet."
Tsvangirai increasingly has focused on wooing the leaders of other nations and South African officials other than Mbeki. One of Tsvangirai's first meetings in South Africa was with Jacob Zuma, the bitter rival of Mbeki who ousted him as party leader in December.
In a sign of the growing political resistance to Mugabe in South Africa, where he long was regarded among the foremost heroes of anti-colonial liberation, union workers in the port city of Durban refused this week to unload a shipment of ammunition and mortars sent to the military from a Chinese company, according to news reports.
After the interview, Tsvangirai spoke with a radio station broadcasting into Zimbabwe.
Then, he attended to one of the many mundane matters more easily resolved in South Africa than in Zimbabwe. He welcomed a salesman carrying an armload of shoes into the conference room. Tsvangirai tried on several, then picked a new black leather pair for his eventual return home.
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