Newsroom

LOCATION BBC Radio 4 Today Programme

SPEAKER Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai

EVENT The situation in Zimbabwe

DATE 22/06/2009

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai commented on the situation in Zimbabwe during an interview on Radio 4 on Monday 22 June.

Read the transcript

Ed Stourton (ES): Later today the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, will meet Gordon Brown. Britain is the latest leg of a tour that Mr Tsvangirai is making to raise funds but so far the leaders he's met, including President Obama, have been cautious about giving money to a regime that still includes Robert Mugabe. The two men have of course been part of a power sharing administration since February.

Our correspondent, Mike Thompson, who recently returned from an undercover assignment in Zimbabwe, met the MDC Leader yesterday and asked him what the response to his appeal for funds had been.

Morgan Tsvangirai (MT) (Prime Minister of Zimbabwe and MDC Leader): The response has been mixed in some areas but I think generally people want to support the progress towards democracy. They ask (indistinct) that certain benchmarks of the global political Government have not been fulfilled but to a large extent I think they do see the progress.

Mike Thompson: But it seems they haven't seen enough progress and if we look for instance at, at farms, we're still seeing farms being repossessed without any compensation and this is further crippling food production which is almost non existent anyway.

MT: We are trying to rationalise the whole land reform and we have already agreed as a Government. Both the parties agree that we need to audit what has taken place and once that audit is there we will put in an independent commission that is then going to deal with all these grievances.

Mike Thompson: Amnesty International, the human rights' organisation, has just been to your country, finished a visit late last week. They say there are still big concerns about continuing human rights' abuses. It wouldn't cost you any money would it to stop people being intimidated, to allow media freedom, to allow peaceful demonstrations? That doesn't cost you money.

MT: Well let me say this. It's totally indefensible. The reason why we end up in this agreement was that we wanted to give Zimbabwe its freedoms and it would be unusual for us to be supporting those kind of unlawful actions. But you know this is a transition and sometimes you have residual resistance here and there and I, I'm not going to defend that, but in the meantime reforms are taking place.

Mike Thompson: When I last came I had to report undercover. So you're saying fairly soon I could, and other people, could come totally legally?

MT: I am sure by July you should be in a position coming openly, not as a tourist, but as, as a reporter and the commission should be there by end of this month and that commission should be able to register and license radios, TVs and foreign correspondents.

Mike Thompson: Just staying if I may with human rights' concerns, one of your own Ministers told me that every day, or almost every day, MDC members, supporters, even Ministers like her are receiving death threats. She said, and I quote, "No one is safe in Zimbabwe."

MT: Well I know who we are talking. We are talking of Sekai Holland is it?

Mike Thompson: Indeed.

MT: I, I'm afraid that the paranoial fear is an environment that used to exist in the country before the inclusive Government and once the inclusive Government was there the situation has dramatically improved for the better.

Mike Thompson: But I talked to her only weeks ago, well into the unity Government before ...

MT: I can't judge how she came to that conclusion. If there's anyone who is supposed to be threatened, it's me, and I can confirm that there's never been any threat of my life ever since the, the formation of the inclusive Government. There has been a substantial decrease in those kind of activities.

Mike Thompson: Quite a few other people I talked to, they, they said there is a lull in the violence. It's not like it was last year ...

MT: Yeah, oh yeah.

Mike Thompson: ... during the elections but they said what worries them is that this violence could return at any moment because the people responsible for it, for the, for the killings, for the thousands of people injured, for, for torture, abductions, these people are still at large. There's been no action taken against anybody.

MT: Well we all acknowledge that the country is coming out of a political conflict not of the extent of Somalia and some of these African states where violence has been an instrument but it is a post conflict situation with all the characteristics of a post conflict situation. The only thing is that how do we manage this transition.

Mike Thompson: Even Zimbabwean exiles here, when you were speaking to them on Saturday night and you said, "Come home, we need you, things are now stable", they jeered. They just didn't believe it, did they?

MT: Well they didn't and I think, I think it's, it's, it's a paranoid obsession of what was happening before, and I will not be the one to force them to accept what I am explaining.

Mike Thompson: But there are seven MDC activists who were abducted late last year, they're still missing aren't they? Do you know what's happened to them? What's been done to them?

MT: No I, unless, unless we are able to, to get the facts it is just become a speculative story. We don't know what the circumstance is. You know because we have read so many people who have run away from Zimbabwe, ended up in Botswana and South Africa, so you can not say they have disappeared. So you have to take those facts very, very with a pinch of salt.

Mike Thompson: Now later today Zimbabwe's High Court is going to rule on an application from the MDC for party activists facing trial for allegedly plotting to topple President Mugabe. They want the case referred to the Supreme Court. What do you think is going to happen here and how important ...

MT: Nothing.

Mike Thompson: ... is this decision?

MT: They have not committed those crimes. I believe so myself. It's just a following up of due process and I am sure that there is no basis for the state to prove anything because they have not committed them.

Mike Thompson: Another one of the concerns that many people I spoke to in Zimbabwe had was that your party, in order to be able to form a unity Government, in order to get power and have some influence over what's happening in the country, have had to give away a little bit too much to Zanu PF and, and President Mugabe and have now started in some ways wearing their clothes, being co-opted.

MT: There is a mistaken view that the MDC has been co-opted and let me say that we have the majority in Parliament. How can the majority be co-opted by a minority? I think, I think that people have to make an assessment. People wanted overthrow of Mugabe. If they wanted that then they should have embarked on a revolution. If in our view it's not a revolution, it's an evolution, then we should actually say that the compromise was the best option available, no matter whether you like Mugabe or not.

Evan Davis: Mike Thompson there talking to Morgan Tsvangirai.