Sunday, February 15, 2009

Tsvangirai's aide arrested

from the NYTimes

...The arrest of Roy Bennett, a white farmer who is treasurer of Mr. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change and his nominee for deputy agriculture minister, soured what was to have been a day of pageantry and good will as ministers in the new coalition government were sworn in.

You mean it isn't normal to arrest opposition members in democracies...alas, Zim is not a democracy...

Instead, Mr. Bennett’s incarceration at a jail in eastern Zimbabwe again suggests how difficult it will be for Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, which has ruled Zimbabwe for almost three decades, to work constructively with a political opposition that it has long derided as a pawn of the West and subjected to violent intimidation.

Huh? It's difficult for a bunch of thugs to work with those committed to democracy?

What does the NYTimes want us to do, feel sorry for them?

As for "pawn of the west": That's typical marxist propaganda, as you well know it...but what it is doing in the same sentence as "subject to violent intimidation" I don't know. It's a poorly written sentence, indeed a poorly written paragraph, almost as if someone censored the original report poorly...

Hours before Mr. Bennett’s arrest, Mr. Tsvangirai, who was himself acquitted of treason charges in 2004,

Yes. Mugabe used that charge against anyone crass enough to criticize him...

told journalists that the world needed to stop thinking of Mr. Mugabe

Just ignore that elephant in the room, fellahs

as the problem and to see instead that confidence was building in the power-sharing deal, under which he and Mr. Mugabe are to govern Zimbabwe together.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Tsvangirai did not sound so cheerful. While careful not to criticize Mr. Mugabe, he suggested that some in ZANU-PF would like the deal to fail.

Heh. D'ya think so?

His view echoed that of civic activists who worry that hard-liners in Mr. Mugabe’s repressive security services, perhaps fearful of prosecution for their human rights crimes, are trying to scuttle the deal....

(Tsvangirai defended his agreement to make a joint government)..
“People have no food, no schools,” he said. “The country is on its knees. We had to act. We could not be seen to be authors of chaos.”

In other words, the venal press that would "report" Mugabe's lies as truth were pressuring Tsvangirai to do something, never mind that anyone who knows Mugabe knows the agreement is a trick.

The article then goes on to say that Tsvangirai is trying to win over civil servants and police by promising to pay them n foreign currancy, but since the US and UK won't stop sanctions until Mugabe shows the agreement isn't a sham, it's sort of like a catch 22 or PM Tsvangirai.

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