Regional efforts to resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis ground to a halt on Monday as Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai refused to attend a Southern African summit until he is granted a passport.
As a result, talks have been postponed by another seven days and moved back to Harare on October 27.
”Tsvangirai was supposed to attend, but due to technical problems, which have occurred from his side, he was not able to come. That’s why the meeting is taking place in Harare,” Swazi King Mswati III told journalists.
Tsvangirai had been due to meet in Swaziland’s capital, Mbabane, with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and four other regional heads of state to break a five-week deadlock over forming a unity government.
But Tsvangirai’s MDC said the former union leader had only received emergency travel papers late on Sunday, calling the delay an ”insult” to the man meant to become prime minister under the unity accord.
Tsvangirai has not been granted a normal passport for nearly a year, and is only allowed to leave the country on emergency travel documents valid for a single trip.
”We are not travelling with this [emergency document]. It’s an insult,” the MDC’s chief negotiator, Tendai Biti, told reporters in Johannesburg.
Biti insisted his party would not pull out of the power-sharing accord, saying: ”We’ll be the last to walk out of the deal.”
Mugabe’s spokesperson, George Charamba, said that Tsvangirai, whose passport expired last year and was not renewed, had been given an emergency travel document ”because Zimbabwe is running out of paper for passports … because of sanctions”.
But Tsvangirai refused to budge.
”He is not travelling to Mbabane until he has his passport,” his spokesperson, George Sibotshiwe, said.
‘Bad faith’
Neighbouring Botswana condemned Zimbabwe’s failure to grant Tsvangirai a passport, saying it was ”unfortunate, totally unacceptable and an indication of bad faith”.
The spat over travel papers was the latest twist in the battle over the unity accord, which would keep 84-year-old Mugabe as president while naming Tsvangirai to the new post of prime minister.
The deal is deadlocked over who should control powerful ministries — particularly home affairs, which oversees the police force.
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki mediated four long days of talks between the rivals in Harare last week.
After failing to break the impasse, they had agreed to turn to the South African Development Community’s security body — currently headed by Swaziland — to find a solution.
The talks opened with Mugabe and Mbeki along with South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, Swazi King Mswati and Mozambican President Armando Emilio Guebuza.
Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, also attended the summit for talks on the conflict in his country.
Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe in a first-round presidential vote in March, when the MDC also forced the president’s long-ruling Zanu-PF party into the minority in Parliament for the first time.
He failed to win enough votes for an outright victory and then pulled out of the run-off in June, accusing the regime of coordinating a brutal campaign of violence that left scores of his supporters dead.
The political deadlock has dimmed hopes for halting Zimbabwe’s stunning economic collapse, with the country buckling under the world’s highest rate of inflation last recorded at 231-million percent.
Nearly half the population needs United Nations food aid, while 80% of the people are living in poverty. — Sapa-AFP