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22nd July, 2008
HARARE: Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his bitter rival Morgan Tsvangirai were to attend the signing of a deal on Monday to pave the way for full-fledged talks between their feuding parties, in their first joint appearance for years.
The agreement will set in motion discussions on resolving the embattled country’s protracted political crisis.
The two rivals are not thought to have met in public at least since Tsvangirai, a former chief trade unionist, formed his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at the end of 1999.
“Their last meeting was certainly long ago,” said Tsvangirai’s personal spokesman George Sibotshiwe.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said an agreement would be inked Monday afternoon, laying out a framework within which negotiations would be held under the mediation of South African President Thabo Mbeki.
“The signing will take place this afternoon,” Chinamasa, who is also the chief negotiator for Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, told AFP.
Mbeki was met by Mugabe when he arrived in Zimbabwe to oversee the signing.
“The memorandum represents a positive step forward in the ongoing dialogue among the parties as facilitated by President Mbeki acting on behalf of SADC,” said a South African foreign ministry statement
“Of course the president (Mugabe) will be there for the signing ceremony,” Chinamasa told AFP.
A member of the MDC, who asked not to be named, said: “Yes, Morgan is going to be signing the memorandum of understanding personally but before that he is going into a standing committee meeting.”
The signing of the pact comes after a series of meetings between Mbeki, the rival parties and officials from the United Nations and African Union.
UN special representative to Zimbabwe Haile Menkerios and African Union commission chairman Jean Ping, who met with the parties over the weekend, had both earlier expressed confidence the pact would be signed.
Menkerios said the draft, once signed, would clear the way for actual talks on the future of the crisis-ridden country to take place.
The 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) which mandated Mbeki to mediate the Zimbabwe crisis in March 2007, said it hoped the talks would yield a result before a meeting of the bloc’s leaders in August.
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