South Africa will host a regional summit this weekend aimed at breaking a political impasse in Zimbabwe on forming a unity government, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
Leaders from the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) will meet on the Zimbabwe crisis on Sunday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said.
”It’s on Sunday,” he said, but added that the location had not yet been decided. ”We are still working on the venue.”
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing deal on September 15, but efforts to create a unity government have stalled over disputes on who will control the most important ministries.
South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and other key regional leaders have already held two summits over the last three weeks to try to press the rivals into a compromise.
At their last meeting in Harare on October 27, Mugabe and Tsvanhirai agreed only to bring the dispute before an emergency SADC summit.
A communique released after the talks said they remained divided over the Cabinet posts, especially the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees the police.
The new summit on Sunday aims to bring together all the leaders of Southern Africa to save the power-sharing deal, seen as the best hope for ending months of political turmoil and halting Zimbabwe’s stunning economic collapse.
The protracted political feuding has dimmed hopes of easing the plight of Zimbabwe’s people.
Nearly half the population is expected to need international food aid by the end of the year, according to the United Nations, as the nation buckles under the world’s highest rate of inflation, last estimated at 231-million percent.
Election rerun
The regional bloc has tried for seven years to press Mugabe into a compromise with Tsvangirai, but its members are deeply divided over Zimbabwe.
Some leaders are strong allies of Mugabe, who is still respected as a liberation hero, while others blame him for the country’s economic ruin, which has caused waves of migrants to cross its borders to seek work.
President Ian Khama of Botswana, one of the region’s toughest critics of Mugabe, on Monday called for an internationally supervised rerun of the presidential poll in Zimbabwe.
”We strongly believe that the one viable way forward in Zimbabwe is to have a rerun of the presidential election under full international sponsorship and supervision,” he said in a speech to Parliament.
”That way, a repeat of the past run-off presidential election, which was declared by regional and international observers to be neither free nor fair and was characterised by intimidation and violence, can be avoided,” he said.
Tsvangirai won the first-round presidential vote in March, when his MDC gained a majority in Parliament, forcing Mugabe’s Zanu-PF into the minority for the first time since independence in 1980.
But Tsvangirai pulled out of a June run-off, accusing Mugabe’s regime of orchestrating attacks that left more than 100 of his supporters dead.
Amnesty International released a report last week that found a total of 180 people had been killed and about 9 000 injured in political violence since March, most of them MDC supporters.
Heidi Holland, the author of a biography of Mugabe, said she believed that SADC had little influence over the 84-year-old leader.
”I’m not at all sure that Africa has the leverage that people believe it has,” she said.
”I don’t think Mugabe listens to African leaders any more than he does to his frightened people.” — AFP
