More Mugabe bad faith

NY Times:

Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, missed talks in Swaziland on the crisis in his country on Monday, after his rival and negotiating partner, President Robert Mugabe, refused to give him a passport.

The talks were rescheduled for next week, but the government of neighboring Botswana condemned Zimbabwe’s failure to issue the passport as “totally unacceptable and an indication of bad faith.”

Botswana’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, who has refused to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s legitimacy since a discredited, violence-scarred June presidential runoff, also called on other African nations and the United Nations to insist on a new, internationally supervised election in Zimbabwe if the deadlock in power-sharing talks continued.

Botswana’s stance will put other countries in southern Africa on the spot. All of them sent election observers to Zimbabwe for the presidential runoff — and they unanimously agreed the election had not been free or fair. So far, they have opted to pressure Mr. Mugabe, who has been in power for 28 years, and Mr. Tsvangirai, his longtime rival, to negotiate a pact to jointly govern the country.

Botswana, in a press release issued by its Foreign Ministry on Monday, blamed Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, for the deadlock in achieving a unity government, saying the party was “seeking to dominate power.” Heads of state from across the region, including Mr. Ian Khama, who was wildly cheered by opposition members in the audience, watched Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai sign a power-sharing deal more than a month ago.

But the two men have never gotten past the first choices needed to form a government: how to share the government ministries between their parties. Mr. Mugabe has unilaterally claimed almost all the most powerful ministries, a move that Mr. Tsvangirai rejected as a power grab.

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The irony of Mugabe now is his weakness. While he continues to exercise power and abuse power he is too weak to make a deal because the thugs who have backed him and abused the people of Zimbabwe with brutal efficiency fear the rule of law that would come from a new regime. Because of that Mugabe is too weak to cede the kind of power required, to get a deal.

This latest move is just incredible unintelligent. He has further alienated himself from other African rulers and he has lost his South African protector Mbeki. The leader of Botswana has been one of the few in Africa to stand up for the people of Zimbabwe.