Word: mdc
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...State House in Harare, Zimbabwe, the unthinkable will happen. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai (pronounced CHANG-guh-rye) will officially join president Robert Mugabe as the country's prime minister - a move that comes less than a month after a spokesman for Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), likened joining Mugabe's administration to committing "political suicide." Though Tsvangirai captured 5% more votes than Mugabe in the Mar. 29 presidential election, a campaign of violence against MDC supporters and Mugabe's stark refusal to relinquish power after nearly 30 years of uninterrupted rule has brought the Zimbabwean government...
...Resigned from the National Constitutional Assembly in 1999 to found the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), with support from students, intellectuals, trade unionists and white commercial farmers. The following year, the MDC helped defeat a constitutional reform bill that would have extended Mugabe's rule and appropriated farms from white landowners - Mugabe's first electoral defeat. In the June 2000 parliamentary elections, the MDC won almost as many seats as Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, despite a series of attacks that left nearly 30 supporters dead...
...police in March 2007 that drew worldwide condemnation and made Tsvangirai the face of Zimbabwean resistance; he has already survived 3 assassination attempts. After Mugabe called for a June 2008 runoff election, Tsvangirai fled the country amid police attacks against his supporters. According to Amnesty International, at least 100 MDC members have been killed since the election. Citing the bloodshed, Tsvangirai later withdrew his name from the ballot, though Mugabe proceeded with the election anyways and declared himself the winner...
...times, idealism has to take the backseat and allow pragmatism to lead the way. This seems to have informed Tsvangirai’s decision. The MDC and various pro-democracy forces have attempted democratic change for over a decade. Yet these efforts have been brutally thwarted by the Zimbabwean government through the introduction of draconian laws, alleged human-rights abuses, and the skewing of democratic space against the opposition, among other measures. Surely, the world should one day demand accountability for these actions. Pragmatically, that time is not now. Mugabe has no intention of exiting the political picture and forcing...
...Naturally, this left the opposition with very few alternatives. The only plausible option was for the MDC to simply take the fight for democratic change to a new scene, to a new platform: an imperfect unity government. By agreeing to this compromise deal, Tsvangirai understood this. Mugabe is as much a part of the solution as he is the problem...