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Mugabe steels himself for showdown
Jan Raath, The Times (UK)
March 28, 2007

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article1577335.ece

President Mugabe faces a strong challenge to his Government this week as he confronts an increasingly fractious ruling party, and answers a summons from regional African leaders who have lost patience with chaos on their borders.

He flies to Tanzania tomorrow for a summit of the Southern African Development Community, the region’s 14-nation economic bloc, with the instability in Zimbabwe on the agenda for the first time in seven years of lawlessness and state-driven economic failure.

The next day he hurries back to Harare in an attempt to force the two most powerful organs of his ruling Zanu (PF) Party, the central committee and the politburo, to agree to put him forward as its sole candidate for presidential elections due next year, which would keep him in power until the age of 89.

Mr Mugabe’s authority was delivered a heavy new blow yesterday as the Roman Catholic Church —the country’s dominant religion, but until now divided by pro-government bishops — issued a damning statement. Mr Mugabe regards himself as a devout Catholic.

"The confrontation in our country has now reached a flashpoint," said the letter, signed by nine bishops. "Many people are angry and their anger is now erupting into open revolt in one township after another. As the suffering population becomes more insistent, generating more and more pressure through boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and uprisings, the state responds with ever-harsher oppression through arrests, detentions, banning orders, beatings and torture.

"In order to avoid further bloodshed and avert a mass uprising, the nation needs a new people-driven constitution that will guide a democratic leadership chosen in free and fair elections that will offer a chance for economic recovery under genuinely new policies."

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change announced that it would boycott Mr Mugabe’s planned elections next year without a new democratic constitution.

"No one is going into an election without a new constitution," said Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, whose face is still swollen and left eye almost shut after his beating by police on March 11. "We will not make the fundamental error of going into an election whose results are already known."

Mr Mugabe’s summons to SADC ends years of his neighbours’ policy of so-called quiet diplomacy. Countries such as South Africa have ignored calls from Western governments to exert pressure on him to check the ruination and violence that have driven out millions of Zimbabweans.

"They will tell him the brutal truth that they cannot go on like this, that the reality is that the situation is unsustainable," Eldred Masunungure, a Zimbabwean analyst, said. "They will call for the normalisation of the situation, and telling him that he will have to start right away", on a new constitution, amending the country’s oppressive laws and scrapping the deeply flawed electoral system.

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