Mugabe tightens grip on military

Power-sharing deal threatened

JOHANNESBURG - In a step that could jeopardize a painstakingly negotiated power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has declared that his party will retain ministries that control the military and the police, state media reported yesterday. The crucial Finance Ministry was still in dispute.

Opposition officials condemned his decision and said their party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would not join a government in which the key ministries were occupied by officials of ZANU-PF, the governing party.

Since the power-sharing agreement was signed more than three weeks ago, Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was to serve as prime minister under the deal, have been deadlocked over the division of ministries.

The delay in forming a unity government could exacerbate the country's humanitarian crisis, aid groups have said.

Most of Zimbabwe's 12 million people are now living in dire and worsening poverty as inflation has soared to 231 million percent, according to official statistics. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe yesterday introduced a new $50,000 Zimbabwe note, enough to buy three loaves of bread.

The United Nations estimates that about one-third of the population is now hungry and in need of food aid, which is overwhelmingly provided by the United States, Britain and other Western countries often denounced by Mugabe.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai agreed after meeting on Friday to request the intervention of Thabo Mbeki, who was recently ousted as president of South Africa by his own party but remains the official mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. Mbeki is scheduled to fly into Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, tomorrow, his spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said.

An opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, said Mugabe's allocation of ministries was a strategy meant to preempt Mbeki's mediation and called on African leaders and the international community to intervene. In a statement, he called Mugabe's division of the ministries "a giant act of madness which puts the whole deal into jeopardy.

"The MDC did not append its signature to a ZANU-PF power-grabbing deal but to a power-sharing deal," he said.

Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe, who has been in office for 28 years, in an election in March, but did not win a majority. Mugabe remained in office through what human rights groups and witnesses said was a military-led campaign of violence against the opposition before the runoff in June, which was denounced by independent African election monitors as a sham.

Tsvangirai had dropped out of the runoff days before it was held, citing the killing and beating of many of his party's workers and supporters.

The Herald, the state-owned newspaper, reported yesterday that Mugabe had allocated to his own party the ministries of Defense, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Justice and Media, among others.

It left open the possibility of further negotiation on the Finance Ministry, which it described as being still in dispute although the president has provisionally assigned it to his party.

Tsvangirai's party was given ministries that oversee Constitutional Affairs, Energy, Health, Labor, and Social Welfare, among others.