Aides to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe last month sent a retired white army officer to discuss plans with the head of the country’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition party to edge the long-time leader from power, the MDC leader said in a statement on Wednesday.
But Morgan Tsvangirai reiterated that reports in the British press that he had entered into a deal to push Mugabe out of office and into exile while a transition government was set up were false.
Colonel Lionel Dyck, who served in both the colonial Rhodesian army and in the Zimbabwean army before retiring some 10 years ago, approached Tsvangirai to discuss a succession plan for Mugabe, in power for nearly 23 years, the statement said.
Dyck told Tsvangirai that he had been sent by the speaker of parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa and army commander General Vitalis Zvinavashe, the statement by Tsvangirai, who heads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, the statement said.
”Dyck came to see me at my home purporting to be carrying a message from Emmerson Mnangagwa and General Zvinavashe,” it said, denying, however, that the MDC was party to any pact to oust Mugabe.
Britain’s Times newspaper reported on Monday that a scheme had been hatched by senior officials in Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu-PF) to guarantee him immunity from prosecution for alleged human rights abuses in return for his resignation and exile abroad.
”This is not true, no deal was struck. I have never met Mnangagwa and Zvinavashe. I met Dyck who claimed to be their messenger. I did not look for him. He came to me,” Tsvangirai said in the statement.
He said he had told Dyck that the MDC was prepared to assist with setting up a transitional government, but not if it involved ”some underhand pact with Zanu-PF”.
Tsvangirai — who has refused to recognise Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s legitimate leader, saying the March 2002 election that returned him to power were seriously flawed and marred by violence — said his party would not be involved in mapping out succession strategies for an ”illegitimate regime”.
”We will not be party to any political arrangement that seeks to sanitise Mugabe’s violent legitimacy, and that includes Mugabe’s retirement plans and the so-called government of national unity,” he said.
The government has dismissed the reports of a plot to oust Mugabe as attention-seeking by the MDC, and ”wishful thinking and mischief” on the part of former colonial power, Britain.
Mugabe vowed on Tuesday that he will not leave office until he has wholly implemented controversial land reforms, under which land belonging to white commercial farmers has been seized and redistributed to landless blacks.
Dyck became a businessman after he left the army, and runs a demining firm, Minetech, which has cleared landmines both in Zimbabwe and abroad. – Sapa-AFP