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Zimbabwe Generals' fears of prosecution threaten deal
Celia W. Dugger, New York Times
October 14, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/world/africa/15zimbabwe.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Zimbabwe's military commanders have pressed President Robert Mugabe to shield them from prosecution for the violent crackdown on his political foes this year, senior government officials say, and his response is threatening to derail a power-sharing deal that was supposed to halt the country's dizzying downward economic spiral.

Mr. Mugabe's efforts to placate his generals, as well as senior politicians in his party who are disgruntled about their loss of clout, culminated in his decision last week to unilaterally claim control of ministries that have been pivotal to his 28 years of unbroken political dominance and are seen as critical to protecting his senior generals from the risk of being charged with crimes.

Mr. Mugabe, 84, signed an agreement on Sept. 15 to share power with the political opposition, after an election season in which more than 100 opposition supporters were killed and thousands were beaten — a campaign of violence that senior officials in Mr. Mugabe's party said was organized by the military.

A collapse of the deal would probably intensify Zimbabwe's status as an international pariah, deepen hunger and poverty, and set off a fresh exodus of refugees to neighboring countries. Yet since the agreement was signed, the country's three senior military commanders have worried about their fate under a unity government that includes the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister — a man they deeply distrust, who was himself viciously beaten by the police last year — three officials close to Mr. Mugabe said in recent interviews.

In addition to his retention of control of the armed forces, Mr. Mugabe's insistence on retaining the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees a police force that could potentially investigate and arrest those responsible for political violence, threatens to destroy the deal.

Mr. Tsvangirai told thousands of wildly cheering supporters in Harare on Sunday that he would not be part of a deal that did not give his party control of the Home and Finance Ministries — and he denounced what he termed Mr. Mugabe's power grab.

Thabo Mbeki, the ousted president of South Africa, who brokered the power-sharing deal, met on Tuesday with Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai to try to rescue the accord. But Mr. Mbeki's own clout is now greatly diminished by his precipitous fall from power last month as leader of South Africa, the regional superpower.

Zimbabwe's information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, disputed the idea that the military commanders feared prosecution. "President Mugabe is commander in chief of the armed forces and head of the security ministries," he said. "There is no one guilty here. No one is talking about arrests of anyone. The army is apolitical."

According to other senior officials in the government, however, three days after Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai signed their deal, Mr. Mugabe huddled with the inner circle of generals and politicians who run the country with him, known as the Joint Operations Command.

Even without the pressure from his top generals and officials, Mr. Mugabe may well have been unwilling to relinquish control of core ministries. But on that day, he asked them what they thought of the deal. His military commanders told him they feared it would leave them vulnerable to prosecution for their role in organizing the crackdown before the June runoff election — a crackdown so sweeping that it prompted Mr. Tsvangirai to quit the race days before it was held, saying none of his supporters should have to die to vote for him.

"They said it was too risky to leave the repercussions of such an apparently brutal operation to chance," said a Mugabe confidant; that person and two others who attended the meeting described what happened on condition that they not be named, because the deliberations were secret.

Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader, have developed a surprisingly comfortable relationship over months of negotiations, and in the days after the deal was signed, Mr. Tsvangirai said the octogenarian leader had complained that he was getting a lot of resistance to the deal from within his own party.

"But if he's getting pressure from his own party, so are we," Mr. Tsvangirai said in an interview.

Many of Mr. Tsvangirai's workers and supporters paid a terrible price for their political views, in burned homes, broken bones and flayed bodies. At a minimum, opposition officials say, the party's rank and file want a police force that will protect them from abuse — and many also want justice for the wrongs done to them.

The passions within Mr. Tsvangirai's own party were on display Aug. 26 when Mr. Mugabe inaugurated Parliament, where, for the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980, the opposition had a majority. Some opposition members cried out over and over, "You are a murderer!" Mr. Mugabe's hands trembled.

At the rally on Sunday, Mr. Tsvangirai sought to reassure Mr. Mugabe's party that the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, would not seek retribution. "The guilty are afraid," he said, "but the M.D.C. means well."

Still, as the generals are said to have noted, the 30-page agreement signed a month ago with great fanfare before heads of state from across southern Africa includes no explicit promise of immunity for political crimes.

The seeds of the current impasse were planted on the day the deal was signed. Mr. Tsvangirai put his name to the document, though he had not yet reached an understanding about how he and Mr. Mugabe would divide the ministries, said an opposition official close to the confidential talks.

Mr. Mbeki, the mediator, convinced Mr. Tsvangirai that agreeing to a framework for governing would build confidence. "It was to tie Morgan's and Mugabe's hands together and their feet together until they realized they have to cohabitate," the opposition official said.

The next day, at a meeting of his party's politburo, Mr. Mugabe came under withering fire for surrendering too much authority, politburo members said. The deal was unpopular with both of the main factions in the party: one led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, 62, a former security chief who ran Mr. Mugabe's campaign for the election runoff; the other led by Joice Mujuru, 53, one of Mr. Mugabe's two vice presidents, and her husband, Solomon Mujuru, 59, a former army commander. The Mujuru camp complained that Mrs. Mujuru had been reduced to a figurehead in the deal.

Both factions saw the agreement as threatening their control over patronage that they need to win elections, according to a senior official close to Mr. Mugabe. And both were angling for the most powerful jobs from a shrinking pie of ministerial appointments. Under the deal, ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe's party, was entitled to only 15 of the 31 ministries. Politburo members loyal to Mr. Mujuru accused the president of planning to give Mr. Mnangagwa the best portfolios, as a reward for leading the warlike campaign for Mr. Mugabe's re-election in the June 27 runoff.

Mr. Mugabe, in turn, blamed factionalism within the party, and the failure of party leaders to campaign vigorously for him, for Mr. Tsvangirai's having won more votes than he did in the March general election — sentiments he repeated a day later, Sept. 17, at a meeting of the party's Central Committee.

"If only we had not blundered in the harmonized election, we would not be facing all this humiliation," the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, quoted Mr. Mugabe as saying, even as he insisted, "We remain in the driving seat."

Mr. Mugabe got another earful when he met on Sept. 18 with the Joint Operations Command, the inner circle.

Opinion within the command was divided on the deal.

The commissioners of the police and of prisons, Augustine Chihuri and Paradzai Zimondi, and the director general of the Central Intelligence Organization, Happyton Bonyongwe, said the opposition would not want to violate the spirit of the deal by seeking prosecutions, according to officials who were present. A senior official close to Mr. Mugabe who attended the meeting explained that the police were not so worried about prosecution because their vulnerability stemmed more from negligence — that they did not stop the violence or arrest its perpetrators. Nor had the prison services participated directly in the violence. And the intelligence agents, because they dress in plain clothes, are less recognizable.

"The C.I.O. agents are faceless," the official said. "The problem is with the uniformed forces, because their names are out there with the people."

But Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Philip Sibanda, the army commander; and Air Marshal Perence Shiri, the air force commander, said they worried because there had been no explicit guarantee of immunity, according to participants in the meeting.

Spokesmen for the military did not return calls left at their offices on Tuesday. Col. Ben Ncube, spokesman for the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, was reached on his cellphone, but the line went dead when he was asked about General Chiwenga's views on the power-sharing agreement.

Officials at the military meeting said the military leaders had reason to be concerned that there was simply too much evidence of their role. A list of 200 officers they had deployed across the country to oversee the intimidation and beating of opposition supporters — complete with names, ranks and districts where each one was posted — had been leaked to journalists and civic groups.

"The real fear is with the army generals, because their people ran the runoff campaign," one official said.

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