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...subsequent loss of clout, the situation has not improved. The SADC as a group has proven to support Mugabe, as it “resolved” the Mugabe-Tsvangirai agreement at its recent summit by suggesting the co-management of home affairs that so clearly favors Zanu-PF. The SADC compromise places all enforcement—army, national defense, and now police, under home affairs—at the access of Mugabe, a brutal dictator. South Africa’s new president, Kgalema Motlanthe, has said he will take a harder line with Mugabe in general policy...
...Tsvangirai would share power, with Mugabe as president chairing the National Security Council and Tsvangirai as prime minister chairing the Council of Ministers. The two would split control over the government’s key ministries. Most significantly, Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) would retain control of the army and national defense, while Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would be in charge of daily operations and home affairs. Tsvangirai considers the latter cabinet essential given its control of the police, who were tools for Mugabe’s suppression...
...control. Although Mbeki had managed to persuade the two leaders to share power in a Sept. 15 deal, once the discussion moved on to allocating ministries in a unity government - and taking some of the key levers of power out of the hands of Mugabe's Zanu-PF party - the process broke down. Mbeki flew back to Harare last week, hoping to save the deal, although his own authority had been reduced somewhat by the fact that he had, in the interim, been forced out of the presidency of his own country in a humiliating defeat...
...Mugabe, under pressure from party cronies to hold the key cabinet positions for Zanu-PF, may also be betting that with more immediate concerns distracting the international community, he can push back against the power sharing without suffering too much pressure from his neighbors. Zimbabwe's only president since independence in 1980, Mugabe has taken wildly different positions since the March elections, in which the MDC won control of parliament and Tsvangirai finished first in the presidential race, although without an absolute majority. At the time, Mugabe said Zimbabweans had made a "mistake," and his security forces unleashed a wave...
...generals are unlikely to relinquish control. "Until the balance of power shifts, and the generals around Mugabe start realizing that they need the opposition, I think one has to be quite pessimistic," Friedman said. And as long as reconciliation remains elusive at the top the followers of Zanu-PF and the MDC are unlikely to embrace one another. "It would be naive to think that the deep-seated rivalry between the two parties will suddenly disappear," Zimbabwean political analyst Eldred Masunungure told TIME. "The MDC supporters think they have finally won over ZANU-PF, which is wrong...