Tsvangirai back home after three-week visit to Europe & USA

By Tichaona Sibanda
29 June 2009

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai arrived home on Monday after a three week visit to Europe and the United States to ‘re-engage’ with the international community.

Tsvangirai’s spokesman James Maridadi told us that during the tour, the Prime Minister managed to raise over $US200 million, which will go towards the provision of basic services such as health and education. An amount far short of the estimated US$8,3 billion needed to rebuild the country.

On his way back to Harare, the Prime Minister stopped over in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he defended his move in entering the power-sharing deal with Robert Mugabe, saying they would succeed or fail together.

Reports quote Tsvangirai sayin; ‘Those who accept me have to accept Robert Mugabe. If there is a problem, we go and fail together.’

He added; ‘I don't have to defend Mugabe’s past and position towards the west or other countries. We are in this transition and this transition is working.’

The Prime Minister has reiterated that his tour to drum-up support for the inclusive government was a success, despite criticism from Western leaders of continued human rights abuses and complaints at the slow pace to implement the Global Political Agreement fully.
During a media briefing at the Southwark Cathedral in London last week, the Prime Minister argued that what the inclusive government needed from the outside world now was not isolation, but support.
Analysts said while it is true there has been an improvement in the condition of Zimbabwe in recent months, there is also plenty of evidence that Mugabe’s grip on the country has not loosened.
Amnesty International reported last week that the human rights situation remains ‘precarious.’ Issues of human rights have long tainted Mugabe’s image in the international community but now even ministers from the MDC have joined the ZANU PF bandwagon of denying reports of human righs abuses in the country.

Last week the MDC deputy Minister of Mines, Murisi Zwizwai, denied there were any killings in the eastern Marange diamond fields last year. He told a meeting of the Kimberley Process in Namibia last week that the claims were a result of ‘unsubstantiated reports.’

But the militant chairman of the MDC veterans activists association, Solomon Chikohwero, said Zwizwai’s statement was very disturbing because there is a lot of evidence that many people lost their lives at the diamond fields because of a military campaign to clear the area of illegal diamond hunters.

‘We urge the deputy minister to retract that statement. If he refuses, we are mobilizing people to march to his office with names and pictures of people who perished at Chiadzwa. I know the deputy minister on a personal level and I don’t have any problems with him but on this occasion he made a monumental blunder that needs to be corrected,’ Chikohwero said.

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