Friday, September 12, 2008

Power sharing deal reached

From the UKTelegraph:

Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai have agreed to share power after a decade of bitter enmity, the impoverishment of millions of Zimbabweans, and a brutal election campaign that saw more than 200 opposition supporters killed....

The agreement will be signed at a formal ceremony in Harare on Monday, he said, declining to go into details on how the pact would work, although it is widely expected that Mr Mugabe will remain president while Mr Tsvangirai becomes an executive prime minister.

The key question has been whether Mr Mugabe would be willing to give up sufficient power to bring Mr Tsvangirai, who came in first place in the first round of the presidential election in March, into government.

A MDC source said last night that under the agreement Mr Mugabe would chair the cabinet, as he has long insisted, but Mr Tsvangirai would chair a "Council of Ministers", which would supervise the cabinet

It remains to be seen how the arrangement will work in practice, and hanging over it is the shadow of the Unity Accord of 1987, when Mr Mugabe brought his long-term foe Joshua Nkomo and his Zapu party into government after massacring as many as 20,000 of his supporters in Matabeleland, then sidelined him and created a one-party state.....

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