Zimbabwe's MDC asks African leaders to help break deadlock

May 17, 2009, 20:49 GMT

Harare - The party of Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said Sunday it wants African organizations to intervene to address issues affecting the country's fragile three-month-old coalition government.

The top leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party met Sunday in Masvingo town about 300 kilometres south of Harare and said it would Monday write to African Union leaders and South African President Jacob Zuma, who chairs the rotating Southern African Development Community (SADC).

MDC's leader Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe of the Zanu-PF party formed a coalition government in February brokered by former South African leader Thabo Mbeki on behalf of SADC. But the power- sharing pact has remained fragile. Tsvangirai has pointed to politically motivated arrests and accuses Mugabe of making unilateral decisions in appointing senior government officials, including the attorney general, the central bank boss and the diplomats.

'We have met today and we are unhappy of the failure to solve the outstanding issues - one meeting after the other have failed to solve these issues,' Tendai Biti, the MDC secretary general told a rally after the meeting. 'In our meeting, we said the guarantors to the agreement who are SADC and the African Union must now come in to referee these outstanding issues because we are tired.'

Biti said the party would ask Zuma and AU comission chairman Jean Ping to attempt to resolve the disagreements within the coalition government.

Tsvangirai told the rally that the credibility of the coalition government had been overshadowed by a series of arrests that are generally considered political. Since the beginning of May, two journalists and a human rights lawyer were arrested in separate incidents and other activists have been in and out of jail several times since December.

'Zanu-PF must contribute to the stabilization of the economy instead of embarking on these arbitrary arrests of people,' he said, adding respect of the rule of law and human rights was necessary to secure international assistance.

'We are busy luring investors and international assistance but Zanu-PF is not concerned about the misery of Zimbabweans. We (MDC) are not satisfied with the dragging of feet to solve the outstanding issues and these arbitrary arrests. If we are ever going to get international aid or resources, all this nonsense about the arrests must stop.'

Zimbabwe is facing its worst economic and humanitarian crisis since its independence from Great Britain in 1980. It has recorded a negative growth since 2000. Mugabe's critics blame his policies, but Mugabe claims Britain and the Western powers are sabotaging him for embarking on a land reform programme which displaced white commercial farmers.