Zimbabwe crisis talks to begin

Pretoria, July 24: Talks were to begin in earnest on resolving Zimbabwe's political crisis on Thursday after President Robert Mugabe gave his top lieutenants the final go-ahead to negotiate power-sharing with the opposition.Sources in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and the governing ZANU-PF parties confirmed their top negotiators had ... ...flown out of Harare and would now sit down together at a secret venue in the South African capital Pretoria, two days after the initial scheduled start."The talks will definitely begin today at an undisclosed location," said a senior South African-based MDC official."Tendai Biti (the party's chief negotiator) is around. He is with us and he will participate in the talks.Meanwhile a report in Zimbabwe's state-run newspaper said that Biti had caught the same Johannesburg-bound flight on Wednesday evening with ZANU-PF's negotiators after Mugabe chaired a meeting of the party's politburo.The government mouthpiece said the politburo had discussed a memorandum of understanding signed by Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Monday which laid out a framework for their talks which should be wrapped within two weeks."We met as the politburo to be briefed of the signing of the MoU and chart the way forward. The issues that came up were whether we accept that our people should continue in these negotiations," said ZANU-PF's deputy secretary for information and publicity Ephraim Masawi."We gave Comrade Chinamasa and Comrade Goche the green light for them to go ahead with the negotiations within the parameters signed by the principals.

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