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Whipped, tortured &
burned by 40-strong lynch mob but Scots refuse to
quit farm in
Zimbabwe
Cara Page Exclusive
A SCOTS family tortured
and beaten in Zimbabwe have vowed to stay in their
home.
Norma Saul,
72, and her husband Ronnie, 68, lost their own farm 18 months
ago to
supporters of president Robert Mugabe's land seizure campaign.
They found
work managing another farm outside the capital, Harare.
But the mobs
targeted the farm and attacked Ronnie before luring the
couple's son, Jamie,
39, into a trap.
The elderly couple, originally from Kilbirnie, Ayrshire,
are too frightened
to talk about their ordeal in detail because their phones
are monitored.
Norma said yesterday: "I can't talk about what happened
but we are all fine.
"We are working here for an absentee landlord for a
minimal wage and a free
house and electricity.
"We've lost our own
farm and home and feel like 50 years of our lives have
gone down the
drain."
She added: "We have no choice but to wait and see if we get
compensation.
Financially, we can do nothing else.
"But we are still
together and you get to be resilient. There is no use
throwing your hands in
the air and crying."
Norma's sister, Jean Sherrie, of Dalry, Ayrshire,
described their ordeal.
She said: "They were absolutely terrified and
thought Jamie was going to
die. They are left with nothing."
She said
Ronnie was told to open the gates of the farm, which they were
managing for
an absentee white landlord, by three youths who said they
wanted to discuss
"important business".
When they got inside, they attacked him and were
joined by six other men who
had been hiding nearby.
Jean said: "His
hair was tied with rubber in tight knots all over his head
and he was doused
with water.
"They put the hosepipe under his shirt with the water
running.
"Norma was in the kitchen with one of the men who wouldn't let
her out. They
were emptying her cupboards and taking all her
food."
Norma managed to phone Jamie but the phone was grabbed by one of
the
attackers who told him to send an ambulance as his mother was
"seriously
ill".
The lie was designed to lure Jamie to the farm, where
he was brutally beaten
by the group, which had grown in number to about
40.
Jean said: "The ambulance arrived and they turned it away. Then
Jamie
arrived and they tied his hands and feet with rope and wire. The rope
was so
tight his hands turned blue.
"They made him kneel down and beat
him with chains, sticks and whips made
from fan belts."
Jamie's left
leg was beaten with a burning log from a fire.
Another thug delivered a
karate chop to his neck and smashed him in the
face, breaking his
nose.
Norma feared her son would be killed and managed to break free from
the
kitchen.
She threw herself on top of him to protect him and
suffered a broken thumb
and severe bruising.
Jean said: "She thought
he was going to die and threw herself in the middle.
I think she was very
brave."
Jamie's wife eventually raised the alarm after failing to hear
from her
husband for many hours.
Jean added: "They brought in a local
mediator and my sister and family were
eventually allowed to leave and get
medical attention.
"Jamie was treated for cuts to his eyes, bruising and
burns to his leg.
Ronnie had bruising. They were all terribly
traumatised."
The Scotsman
The evils of total power
The veteran novelist
Doris Lessing spoke frankly about her feelings towards
dictator Robert Mugabe
last night at the Edinburgh International Book
Festival. The author, who grew
up in Zimbabwe, spoke of the damage Mugabe’s
regime had caused to the country
and how she would have like to seen him
ousted by force.
"I sometimes
regard the old days with nostalgia, but then you can’t just
invade someone
else’s country. Though it would have been good for Zimbabwe
if somebody had;
the country is going down the drain."
However, she said would oppose any
such action on principle, as she did the
war against Iraq. "You have a little
problem: it was illegal. Not that I’m
not very glad that Saddam has gone, but
it was illegal.
"Everybody knew there was going to be a war, Bush wanted
a war, and little
Blair trotted along saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ This was an
illegal war, and
now we have to deal with the consequences. Other people can
now say: ‘The US
did this, we can to it too.’ The legal structure in this
world is frail
enough without that."
Lessing questioned the idea that
Mugabe and his inner circle were corrupt
from the beginning. She said: "In
1956, I met the man who is now one of his
most unpleasant associates, and he
was the most idealistic young student you
can imagine. In his early days,
Mugabe drew up a document called the
Leadership Code, saying that no one in
high position should own more than
one farm, and so on, but his followers
ignored it. At that point we should
have said this is a weak man, a bad
man.
"For years, liberals - and I include myself - have stood back and
watched.
What has happened has been unspeakable but we have made excuses for
Mugabe.
We should have known, but we did nothing."
However, Lessing
questioned whether removing the dictator should be seen as
a solution to all
the country’s problems. "Mugabe has created a caste of
fat-cats, a ruling
cast. If he goes, they will still be there. Thousands of
young men have been
brutalised and corrupted, there is a generation of
children without parents
because of AIDS. What Africa should be thinking
about is how to rescue these
kids, with or without Mugabe."
Lessing - who was banned from southern
Africa in 1956 for her outspoken
views - was taking part in a discussion
event on the subject of dictatorship
with the writer and journalist
Christopher Hope, whose book Brothers Under
The Skin: Travels in Tyranny has
just been published. He described the book
as "an attempt to explain to
myself" why tyrants have so much in common,
from a limited vocabulary of
ideas to extraneous facial hair.
"I can only describe power as a curious
perfume which overwhelms you," he
said. "Dictators deliberately destroy the
lives of their own people and do
it with equanimity, merriment and a degree
of acclaim."
Hope was critical of the South African government for not
doing more to
topple the Mugabe regime.
"The present South African
government supports, condones and sits on its
hands with regard to Zimbabwe
in the same way as the last white government
did with Ian Smith. However," he
added, ironically, "if the British army is
in the business of removing
dictatorships in distant parts of the world,
that’s the best news. I have a
little list."
The international flavour of the day continued in the first
of a series of
events featuring writers from the recent Granta list of Young
British
Novelists. Monica Ali, reading a section from her highly acclaimed
first
novel, Brick Lane, evoked the spirit of a Bangladeshi village in the
memory
of an immigrant woman living in Tower Hamlets. David Peace writes
about the
Yorkshire of Peter Sutcliffe while living in Japan, and Dan Rhodes,
author
of the intriguing Timolean Vieta Come Home, inhabits largely a country
of
his own imagination.
It took a dose of sharp Glasgow humour from
Ian Pattison, best known as the
creator of Rab C Nesbitt, to turn our
thinking back to Scotland. In a witty
and insightful hour, he posed a number
of pertinent questions about how we
see ourselves, about writing, comedy and
crime novels.
Fed up with crime books told from the viewpoint of
angst-ridden detectives,
his first novel, Sweet and Tender Hooligan, views
events through the eyes of
the criminal, a Glasgow gangster.
"Jimmy
Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom is one of the best crime books to come out
of
Scotland in recent years. But we don’t like criminals writing about
crime. We
like it to be written by nice middle-class authors who fret about
school
fees, someone we can trust to lead us out at the other side. We want
the
sanitised version." He questioned the billing of his book as a
"hilarious"
dark comedy, although he agreed that it did contain a few
laughs. "When you
write comedy, it’s written through you like Blackpool
through a stick of
rock. You try to write Hamlet, but you can’t."
As well as penning a new
sitcom, The Crouches, which starts next month, set
in a black working-class
family in South London, he is working on his second
novel.
"I tried to
write my great Scottish novel, but my editor said ‘Don’t be
silly’, so I went
back and re-wrote it and put in a corpse."
Yahoo News
Doris Lessing says Mugabe and Blair must go
By Paul
Majendie
EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Outspoken novelist Doris
Lessing firmly believes that
both Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and
Prime Minister Tony Blair must
quit -- but for very different
reasons.
Lessing, who lived most of her childhood in what was
southern Rhodesia and
then came to Britain in 1949, was particularly
trenchant in an interview
with Reuters about the leaders of the two countries
she has called home.
But the feisty 83-year-old author said "You
cannot equate them," labelling
Mugabe a crook and calling Blair "a fantasist.
I think he believes all this
nonsense he talks."
Lessing, hailed
by critics as one of the icons of 20th century literature,
certainly did not
mince her words over either leader and issued dire
warnings over Zimbabwe,
where she moved as a child aged five.
"Mugabe has created a whole
cast of fat cats. When Mugabe steps down -- if
he does -- they will be just
as bad as Mugabe."
"There are hundreds of thousands -- if not more --
of young men and women
who have been totally brutalised. There are also so
many AIDS orphans you
cannot count them."
Lessing, attending an
Edinburgh Book Festival discussion on dictators, said:
"Mugabe has created
this ruling class, this layer of very ruthless thieves."
In the
discussion on dictators, she said that the war in Iraq to topple
Saddam
Hussein was illegal. "Bush wanted a war. Little Blair trotted along
and said
Yes, Yes, Yes."
SCORN FOR BLAIR
Her scorn was palpable for
Blair, whose decision to go to war against Iraq
has deeply divided his
compatriots.
"In the past, what this man has dished out to us would
have had him out of
office by now," she said.
"We have these
totally lying people -- Tony and his gang. They lie all the
time. They have
no respect for themselves or us.
"I have never voted Tory
(Conservative) in my life but I would vote Tory to
get rid of this lot. They
are all shockers."
Lessing, considered a feminist heroine for her
ground-breaking novel "The
Golden Notebook," had little time for today's
feminists who she argues have
turned men into silent victims in the sex
war.
"They should be using all that energy changing society," she said.
Switching from politics, Lessing's eyes light up as she
recounts the plots
from "The Grandmothers," a series of four novellas that is
being published
in November.
For this razor-sharp octogenarian has
no intention of putting her pen down.
"It is what I am. I am a storyteller. I
think about stories."
Lessing, famed for her novels "Martha Quest"
and "Briefing for a Descent
into Hell," has written two acclaimed volumes of
autobiography but will not
be bringing them up to date. "The rest would
involve a lot of my close
friends. I could not write it."
Her
diaries will be going to Britain's University of East Anglia but
she
concluded: "I have burnt one or two diaries which might conceivably
cause
trouble."
Mugabe's ties to the architect of apartheid
Christopher Hope has met his
fair share of tyrants, but non fascinate him so
much as Hendrik Verwoerd, the
man who created apartheid South Africa, and
Robert Mugabe, who is following
in his footsteps
Monday August 11, 2003
The Guardian
I was
about five when I met my first tyrant. His name was Hendrik Verwoerd.
We
lived close to each other in one of those green Johannesburg suburbs
that
named its streets after Irish counties: Kerry, Wexford, Donegal. So much
in
South Africa conspired to remind one of somewhere else. I sometimes think
it
helped people to forget that, for half a century, we had been locked up
in
an institution for the mentally disabled. My Irish grandfather used to
say
to me: "Christopher, shall we be taking a walk and stare at the Doctor?"
I
didn't know Verwoerd was a tyrant then, and I'm sure he didn't know
either;
it's a role you have to grow into. My mother said, "That man spent
the war
knitting socks for Mr Hitler." The year I'm talking about was 1948:
that was
my year for staring hard.
Verwoerd, genial and pink, with a lick
of thick pale hair and flinty eyes.
It was his skin I noticed first: it was
stretched tightly over his bones
like a drum skin. Each afternoon we went
walking past the Doctor's house and
my grandfather would lift his stick, wave
it at the sky and curse softly to
himself. The black man assigned to act as
my nanny also behaved oddly when
we were about to pass the place. He hurried
me to the other side of the
road, as if the house hid some terrible
contagion. I just stared. I tried to
work out what sort of socks the Doctor
would have been knitting for Mr
Hitler.
What Verwoerd pioneered was a
way of making tribalism respectable across
Africa and, once he'd found a
method, the contagion raced across the
continent together with a covey of
modish words - "self-determination",
"autonomy" - that made it so popular,
and still does. Perhaps no other
leader in Africa today more closely
resembles Verwoerd than Robert Mugabe.
They hate so many of the same things,
and they see as their destiny the duty
to save their people and their country
from gangs of marauding enemies,
gays, Jews, British liberals and traitorous
sell-outs among their own tribe.
They seem linked across time in an uncanny
way.
Verwoerd came to be seen as embodying what Afrikaners call
kragdadigheid, a
word which might best be translated as "fighting spirit". He
dreamed of an
unsullied Afrikaner purity, and his vision galvanised his
people. His power
was based on delusion and lies, and the wish of his
followers to be
deceived. His fanaticism, which came to stand for Afrikaner
intransigence,
was not Afrikaans at all: it was too pure, too dogmatic. It
was the fire of
the convert, the terrifying certainty of the newly won-over,
the interloper,
the messianic outsider. Like St Paul, that other furious
apostle of absolute
belief, he was a convert to the faith he made his own.
His deadly enthusiasm
for purity of "the blood" and "die volk" was at odds
with the fact that he
wasn't an indigenous Afrikaner at all.
No one
said so, of course, that would have been heresy. In many ways,
Verwoerd was
precisely the sort of person Afrikaners instinctively disliked:
a foreigner.
His parents had been Dutch immigrants and young Hendrik had not
been born in
South Africa. He was an intellectual in a society that
equated
intellectuality with sedition. He was a theorist in a land where
theory was
scorned. He was a fastidious and strangely mild man in a society
where the
quintessence of masculinity was someone who kicked around a ball,
the
servants, his wife or the children, often at the same time, and such
energy
was regarded as healthily South African.
The Verwoerd family
had emigrated to South Africa from Holland, a fact they
never liked to dwell
upon. They came to stand for sacred racial purity, but
when Betsy Verwoerd
and her children climbed aboard the old tram that
trundled past the Zoo Lake
in Park View, the suburb of Johannesburg where I
lived, my aunt would dig me
in the ribs and we'd stare, even though we knew
staring was bad manners,
because, so the rumour ran, Verwoerd's wife, Betsy,
sombre and austere, was
not entirely 100% classifiably and certifiably
"white".
I had not come
across another quite like Verwoerd until Mugabe began to
mimic the old
Doctor. The resemblance was so uncanny I sometimes wondered if
they were not
perhaps related. Verwoerd was an elected tyrant who crossed
the line between
government and religion: like modern tyrants, he reversed
Charles Peguy's
dictum - that what begins in mysticism ends in politics.
What began for
Verwoerd in crude racial politics ended in mystical
ethnic
subdivisions.
Verwoerd believed that South Africa was a victim
of a worldwide conspiracy,
directed by Britain, which wanted to destroy the
Afrikaner. Britain was the
old enemy, the coloniser, the destroyer; Britain
had tried in successive
wars against the Boers, to liquidate the Afrikaners,
on the battlefield, and
in the concentration camps established by Lord
Kitchener, and then by
economic might. This is Mugabe's belief too.
In
order to safeguard the Afrikaner liberation struggle, Verwoerd ran
a
programme of racial cleansing unlike anything seen before. He did it
with
the support of his party, which had a huge majority in parliament. The
force
used to separate out the black population and drive them into
distant
homelands was never done by decree, it was done by parliamentary
procedure -
votes. The modern world, said Verwoerd, was keen on democracy,
and so he
would achieve his vision with the help of democracy. He would not
hammer
apartheid into place, he would vote it into being. He did so
with
parliamentary lawyers who drafted bills making all forms of dissent
illegal,
immoral and even sacrilegious. He did it with the enthusiastic help
of his
party press, who throughout his rule were so servile that
Afrikaans
newspapers made the old Soviet papers seem positively
bolshy.
Verwoerd ignored the legal opposition and he beat, imprisoned and
allowed
his police to murder his more rebellious opponents. He did it with
the help
of the courts who applied those laws unquestioningly - in 50 years
of
apartheid, no judge ever resigned rather than continue to work in a
system
which victimised most of the population.
He destroyed the
parliamentary system which he so scrupulously exploited by
packing the senate
with his place-men. He instituted a system of censorship
so severe it
resembled the Vatican Index. He accused his local critics and
the press of
being in the pay of communist powers, he expelled foreign
journalists, he
controlled the state media. He maintained that the Afrikaner
was the "true"
African who had been robbed of his land by the British during
the Boer war.
He said that blacks occupied land that rightfully belonged to
whites and they
were to be driven off that land and stripped of their farms.
They were
illegal squatters, "temporary sojourners" in white South Africa.
When the
Commonwealth asked him to think again, he replied that his was a
sovereign
state and would brook no outside interference. When the
Commonwealth lost
patience and it seemed South Africa was about to be
expelled, Verwoerd got in
first and fired the Commonwealth.
Just as Mugabe is cheered in many
African councils, the Doctor was supported
in his delusions, in his icy
dedication, in his dreamy tyranny, in his
absurd ideas of ethnic purity and
the sacredness of Afrikaner blood, by most
of his white compatriots. It was a
career of almost unrelieved destruction,
and it left his country so badly
wounded it has still not recovered. It is
40 years since Verwoerd went,
struck down by an assassin in parliament, at
the very seat of his power, but
the scars are still fresh.
And at almost every step, Mugabe has followed
suit.
Tyrants are pneumatic, they puff up like beach balls, like giant
dirigibles,
they inflate and grow bigger until they loom over the land like
horrible
Hindenburgs. I learned this by watching Verwoerd and others of
the
tyrannical kidney - but none so closely resembled my old neighbour
than
Mugabe. They are peas in a pod, brothers under the skin. Perhaps that's
why
Verwoerd, when I saw him first all those years ago, seemed to be so
tightly
enclosed in his skin. A terrible emptiness under high pressure.
Baleful
balloonmen. Eventually they pop, but it is always too late, and the
mess is
terrible.
· Extracted from Brothers Under the Skin by
Christopher Hope, published by
Macmillan on Friday. To order a copy for
£15.99 plus p&p (rrp £17.99), call
the Guardian book service on 0870 066
7979.
Short denied responsibility to Zimbabwe
Mark Lobel
Monday August 11,
2003
The Guardian
Clare Short informed the Zimbabwean government in
1997 that the election of
a Labour government "without links to former
colonial interests" meant
Britain no longer had "special responsibility to
meet the cost of land
purchases", according to documents obtained by the
Guardian.
However, ministers maintained conditional support for the regime's
land
reform programme and distanced themselves from campaigner Peter
Tatchell's
attempt to arrest Robert Mugabe for human rights abuses. In a
letter to
Zimbabwe's minister of agriculture, Kumbirai Kangai, Ms Short said:
"We do
not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the cost
of
land purchase in Zimbabwe.
"We are a new government from diverse
backgrounds without links to former
colonial interests."
The then
international development secretary's letter did offer qualified
support for
land reform, stating: "We do recognise the very real issues you
face over
land reform... we would be prepared to support a programme of land
reform
that was part of a poverty eradication strategy, but not on any
other
basis."
Despite the increasingly violent nature of Mr Mugabe's
land redistribution
programme, the government continued to offer conditional
support. A 1998
draft message from Tony Blair to the Zimbabwean president,
also obtained by
the Guardian, states: "My government recognises that the
present pattern of
land ownership needs to be fundamentally changed. We
remain willing to
assist with a land reform programme which is transparent
and fair and has
the support and participation of beneficiaries and
stakeholders."
But this insistence on the support of stakeholders, such
as white
landowners, infuriated Mr Mugabe. At the Commonwealth summit in 1999
he
said:"The Conservatives were more mature. This government is
inexperienced.
I am not the only Commonwealth leader who believes that," he
said.
Bilateral relations deteriorated further when the human rights
activist
Peter Tatchell ambushed Mr Mugabe's limousine and tried to perform
a
citizen's arrest when he visited London for talks with the then
Foreign
Office minister, Peter Hain.
The Telegraph
Home Office 'cruel' to wife of Briton who fled Mugabe
By
Richard Savill
(Filed: 11/08/2003)
The Home Office has been
accused of "cruelty and ineptitude" over its
handling of a visa application
by the South African wife of a British
citizen who was forced to flee
President Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe.
Averil Pratt, a teacher, who has
been married to her husband Steven for 31
years, was told she would have to
leave Britain by today and return to
Zimbabwe to apply to re-enter this
country.
However, at the 11th hour, following protests by her MP and
inquiries last
week by The Telegraph, she has been told she can stay and that
her
application is "a priority".
The couple, who live in a rented
cottage in Harberton, Devon, arrived in
Britain in February to rebuild their
lives after intimidation by mobs forced
them to abandon their farm in the
South Marondera area of Zimbabwe, 60 miles
from the capital, Harare, where
they lived for three decades.
Mrs Pratt, 53, was permitted to remain in
Britain for six months but was not
allowed to work. She expected her
application for a spouse visa to be
straightforward.
However, she was
later advised the rules had changed, and that she would
have to return to
Zimbabwe to apply. In addition, vital documents went
missing at the Home
Office.
Her MP, Anthony Steen, protested in June to the Home Office that
she was "a
genuine asylum seeker and, moreover, a British citizen's wife
seeking a safe
haven from a despotic and brutal regime".
The Home
Office told Mrs Pratt last month that her application to Lunar
House, London,
was invalid as her passport and marriage certificate had not
been included.
Mrs Pratt was adamant that they had been.
After a further protest, the
Home Office told Mr Steen the missing items had
been found with a caseworker
in Sheffield.
In a second letter, Mr Steen wrote: "Ironically the Pratts
left Zimbabwe
because of the brutal Mugabe regime and hoped to be treated
with some
compassion in Britain. How misplaced their trust was. Your
department's
cruel and inept handling of this case beggars belief."
Mr
Pratt said it would be difficult for him to cope on his own as he had
an
amputated right forearm following a shooting accident.
When The
Telegraph inquired about Mrs Pratt's position last week, the Home
Office
refused to discuss individual cases.
But yesterday, Mr Pratt, 53, said
the Home Office had now informed him
indirectly that his wife's case was
being reviewed. The application would be
"a matter of priority".
Last
night, Mr Pratt, who was born in Zimbabwe of British parents, and is
now
working for a charity for the disabled, said: "We came to Britain
prepared to
live in a state of flux for some time. However, we had hoped
that it would
have been easier to sort out Averil's situation.
"We accept there is a
process that has to be adhered to. The problem is that
it has not been. They
have lost documents.
"After everything else we went through in Zimbabwe,
we have been asking,
'Why is this happening to us'?
"We are stressed
out and extremely angry. However, I feel very positive
having had this news
this weekend."
The Herald
Fuel, cash shortages affect travellers
By Maria
Dzikiti
FUEL and bank note shortages made life difficult for those who wished
to
travel this Heroes’ holiday.
Those who at least managed to access
cash still failed to travel owing to
the obtaining fuel crisis.
Bus
operators failed to obtain extra fuel allocations using the
recently
introduced coupon system.
By yesterday afternoon hundreds of
people were stranded at Mbare Musika and
still hoping to get transport to
their rural homes.
"We get only 5 000 litres of diesel for a fleet of 68
buses, restricting us
to just 10 buses a day," said an inspector from
Musasiwa Bus Service.
"We get deliveries from Monday to Saturday but on
Sundays we don’t receive
anything."
Out of the 10 buses from Musasiwa
Bus Service available to ply the
Masvingo-Harare route, only three were
operating.
The inspectors said the Chiredzi route, which covers Chivhu,
Bikita, Chivi
and Zaka districts, required at least 15 buses
yesterday.
Scores of people had made efforts to travel between Friday and
Saturday but
the shortage of buses affected them.
Yesterday morning,
the Police Riot Squad was summoned to Mbare to restore
order when the
situation got out of hand.
"I wanted to go to Mt Darwin on Saturday but I
failed because there were too
many people and buses were few," said Mrs
Hillary Nyamhundo.
"Today I don’t even know whether I will make it
because there is only one
bus on that route."
Despite the obtaining
cash crisis, most people said they had been saving
money for the
holidays.
"I have been saving money for the past weeks and I also
borrowed some from
my workplace," said Tendai Munzvengi destined for
Chiredzi, which now costs
$9 000 a single trip.
"As you can see I am
empty handed, I can’t afford groceries for my
relatives."
Mr Leroy
Mudakureva who was travelling to Kadoma said he had to borrow money
to see
his family in Kadoma, which he had not seen for almost a year.
Zimbabwe
has been experiencing fuel shortages due to lack of foreign
currency and
previous financial mismanagement at the National Oil Company of
Zimbabwe,
once the country’s sole importer of fuel.
But the situation has not
improved even after the advent of private fuel
importers who sell the
commodity at exorbitant prices.
Most people said they were travelling
home to get maize to beat rising
maize-meal prices.
Sunday Times (SA)
MDC goes all out for
dialogue
Monday August 11, 2003 07:20 -
(SA)
HARARE - Zimbabwe's main opposition party said it had been forced to
take
"risky" actions as a way to facilitate dialogue with the country's
governing
party.
"We as a party have taken risky measures as way of
creating a conducive
environment for dialogue with the Zanu-PF," said Morgan
Tsvangirai, leader
of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The
MDC leader who now faces fresh treason charges for organising
anti-government
protest marches, accused President Robert Mugabe's party of
driving the
country to ruin.
Of late the MDC has toned down its confrontational
stance to prefer dialogue
because "Zanu-PF has not idea on how to solve"
Zimbabwe's crises.
The opposition party has ended its boycott of state
occasions addressed by
Mugabe.
It has also dropped the contentious
issue of Mugabe's legitimacy from a
draft agenda it is proposing for resumed
talks with the ruling party
following recent overtures by church leaders to
get the two sides to start
meeting again.
The MDC said Zimbabwe on the
"brink of collapse" as more than half of the
population face starvation while
inflation stands at more than 365 percent.
Electricity and fuel supplies
are erratic as the country has run dry of
foreign exchange to import them,
while local bank notes are also in short
supply.
Unemployment levels
have unofficially hit more than 70 percent and 75
percent of the population
live in abject poverty.
The MDC said, having recognised the "gravity" of
the situation, chose to
resort to talks in a bid to solve the
crises.
"We have chosen the path of dialogue in the hope that this will
bring about
a speedy and peaceful resolution of the country's problems and
stop all the
suffering," Tsvangirai said in a statement.
Tsvangirai
now faces two treason charges for trying to oust Mugabe from
power after the
High Court on Friday refused to drop those charges against
him.
The
MDC last month ended a boycott of Mugabe's address to parliament as
a
conciliatory move to break the long-standing impasse with the
government.
Talks between the two broke down in May of last year after
only the agenda
was drafted.
AFP