Nov 5, 2009, 6:52 GMT
Maputo/Windhoek - Southern African leaders were meeting in Mozambique Thursday in yet another attempt to try to break the deadlock in Zimbabwe's power-sharing government.
President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai have been summoned to Maputo by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional political bloc to discuss a way out of their three-week standoff.
SADC, which acts as the guarantor of Zimbabwe's uneasy unity pact, is to be represented at the talks by SADC chairman, Democratic Republic of Congo president Joseph Kabila, Mozambican President Armando Guebuza, Zambian President Rupiah Banda and President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and Swazi King Mswati III.
Zimbabwe's shaky eight-month-old coalition government has been in crisis since Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) staged a partial pull-out.
The MDC is boycotting cabinet meetings over Zanu-PF's refusal to to fully share power and implement agreed-upon reforms. MDC ministers are continuing to run their portfolios, however.
Several human rights organizations have warned the dispute risks tipping the country back into the political violence that characterized last year's presidential election.
While the Maputo meeting gets underway, an international diamond watchdog is also discussing in Namibia whether to suspend Zimbabwe's gems from a global certification scheme.
The Kimberley Process, which monitors trade in so-called conflict diamonds, is concluding a four-day meeting in the Namibian resort town of Swakopmund.
Rights activists are calling for Zimbabwe's diamonds to be suspended from the scheme following a brutal crackdown by the military on diamond diggers and villagers in the country's eastern Marange diamond fields over the past year.
Your Talkback on this Story