South African President Thabo Mbeki held lengthy talks with President Robert Mugabe in Harare on Thursday over Zimbabwe’s crisis, and was due later to see opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, opposition officials said.
Mbeki was met by Mugabe at Harare International airport, stopped off at a hotel amid an unusually heavy presence of Mugabe’s presidential guard, armed with automatic rifles, and drove off for formal discussions at the president’s official residence, State House.
”In the African revolution we shared the trenches together,” Zimbabwe state radio quoted Mbeki as telling supporters of Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party at the airport.
A spokesperson for Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said ”the party’s leadership” would be meeting Mbeki at a Harare hotel later.
Diplomats said Mbeki appeared to have had a change of heart, his office having earlier ruled out the likelihood of talks with the opposition leader.
The MDC was contacted over the meeting long after Mbeki arrived in Harare.
Mugabe last week withdrew Zimbabwe’s membership of the now 53-member Commonwealth after it resolved to continue Zimbabwe’s suspension for a second year. Zimbabwe was first excluded over rigged presidential elections in March last year.
The MDC said in a statement on Wednesday night that it hoped that Mbeki’s visit would ”fortify and complement the latest Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting position” that ”the root cause of the Zimbabwe crisis is a crisis of governance and legitimacy”.
It said that ”successful brokerage in the resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis will be determined by even-handedness and the willingness to hear both sides of the Zimbabwe political equation”.
Mbeki’s office said earlier on Thursday there would be no change in his controversial policy of ”quiet diplomacy” over Zimbabwe.
Mbeki last week returned from the Commonwealth summit in Abuja, Nigeria, enraged after failing in his bid to get the body to have Zimbabwe readmitted to the organisation, and shocked many colleagues in South Africa last week when he accused Britain of opposing Zimbabwe’s return so that it could protect ”its white, colonial kith and kin”.
He also said Western nations’ demand for democratic reform in Zimbabwe was a disguised bid for ”regime change” to get rid of Mugabe.
He also indicated support for the Harare regime’s lawless seizure of white-owned farms when he said that the four-year expulsion of about 4 000 white farmers was ”probably inevitable”. — Sapa
‘Mugabe can help with SA’s problems’
DA: ‘Read riot act to Mugabe’
Zimbabwe inflation surges