Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s
fate hung in the balance on Friday as he apparently resisted efforts to make
him step down following a seizure of power by the army.
The military said on national
television it was holding talks with Mugabe on the way forward and that it
would advice the nation on their outcome as soon as possible.
The U.S., a longtime critic of
Mugabe over allegations of human rights abuses and election rigging, is seeking
“a new era” for Zimbabwe, the State Department’s top official for Africa said,
an implicit call for the nonagenarian leader to quit.
The unfolding drama in the
capital, Harare, was thrown into confusion when a smiling Mugabe was pictured
shaking hands with Zimbabwe’s military chief, the man behind the coup, raising
questions about whether or not the end of an era was near.
Mugabe unexpectedly drove on Thursday from his
lavish “Blue Roof” compound, where he had been confined, to State House, where
official media pictured him meeting military boss Constantino Chiwenga and
South African mediators.
The official Herald newspaper
carried no reports of the meeting’s outcome, leaving Zimbabwe’s 13 million
people in the dark about the situation.
In an interview with Reuters,
acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Donald
Yamamoto
appeared to dismiss the idea of Mugabe remaining in a transitional or
ceremonial role.
“It’s a transition to a new era for Zimbabwe,
that’s really what we’re hoping for,” Yamamoto said.
The army may want Mugabe, who has
ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, to go quietly and allow
a smooth and bloodless transition to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the vice president
Mugabe sacked on Nov. 6, triggering the crisis.
The main goal of the generals is
to prevent Mugabe from handing power to his wife, Grace, 41 years his junior,
who has built a following among the ruling party’s youth wing and appeared on
the cusp of power after Mnangagwa was pushed out.
Mugabe, who at 93 has appeared
increasingly frail in public, is insisting he remains Zimbabwe’s only
legitimate ruler and is refusing to quit.
Political sources said pressure
was mounting on the former guerrilla to accept offers of a graceful exit.
Zimbabwe’s former head of
intelligence, Dumiso Dabengwa, was to hold a news conference in Johannesburg at
1200 GMT.
A South African government source
said he expected Dabengwa, a close ally of the ousted Mnangagwa, to discuss the
events in Zimbabwe.
“It seems there is some sort of agreement,”
the source said.
The army’s takeover signaled the
collapse in less than 36 hours of the security, intelligence and patronage
networks that sustained Mugabe through almost four decades in power and built
him into the “Grand Old Man” of African politics.
Mugabe is still seen by many
Africans as a liberation hero.
He is reviled in the West as a
despot whose disastrous handling of the economy and willingness to resort to
violence to maintain power pauperised one of Africa’s most promising states.
Once a regional breadbasket,
Zimbabwe saw its economy collapse after the seizure of white-owned farms in the
early 2000s, followed by runaway money-printing that catapulted inflation to
500 billion per cent in 2008.
NAN
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