Zimbabwean opposition boycotts unity government
JOHANNESBURG - Eight months after entering a power-sharing deal with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announced yesterday that he and his party would boycott Cabinet meetings and withdraw from dealing with Mugabe’s party. It is the biggest breach yet in the transitional government.
“It is our right to disengage from a dishonest and unreliable partner,’’ Tsvangirai said yesterday in Harare, the capital.
The catalyst for this step was the jailing Wednesday of Roy Bennett, Tsvangirai’s deputy agriculture minister-designate, a white farmer who is scheduled to stand trial Monday on three-year-old terrorism charges that his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, says are fabricated. But even after Bennett was granted bail yesterday after the news conference, officials in his party said their decision to disengage did not change.
“This is the time for us to say enough is enough,’’ said Thabitha Khumalo, a spokeswoman for the MDC.
Tsvangirai laid out a broad array of grievances. He accused Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, of selectively using the law to punish his legislators, putting 16,000 of its youth militia on the government payroll, and remilitarizing the countryside on bases used in last year’s discredited election to organize a campaign of terror against his supporters.
Although he stopped short of quitting the government, Tsvangirai warned that if the crisis is not resolved and a working relationship restored, he would call for elections supervised by the United Nations.
Tsvangirai’s strategy appears to be in part an effort to get senior political leaders in the African Union and the Southern African Development Union - guarantors of the power-sharing deal - to pressure Mugabe to act in a more conciliatory manner. So far, regional leaders have ignored Tsvangirai’s pleas to step in.
