Tsvangirai: Zanu-PF has nothing to fear in political defeat?

While Zanu-PF fears retribution for past atrocities, it is continuing to inflict more atrocities in order to stay in power and avert retribution - thus creating an unending vicious cycle of violence everytime that its power is challenged in elections.

This realisation prompted Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to repeat an offer that he previously made to Zanu-PF and its military commanders that they have nothing to fear and  should sit down with him and hummer out a deal - an offer which Zanu-PF has snubbed.

Instead the party which lead the independence war 35 years ago still speaks of a "regime-change agenda" to a nauseating extent, clearly as a code for fighting the MDC-T and encouraging its supporters to attack members of the MDC-T.

When MDC-T secretary General Tendai Biti yesterday demanded that President Mugabe's party start dealing with its violent members, and presented laminated pictures of the gruesome murder of Christpowers Maisiri,  Zanu-PF political commissar, Webster Shamu, again rose to blame the violence on "outside forces with an imperialist agenda", according to an SWRadioAfrica report .

With the kind of security regime that Zanu-PF has imposed in most rural areas, it is virtually impossible for any outsiders to go into those communities and cause mayhem, especially in Didymus Mutasa's Headlands, and other constituencies in which security chiefs are now running for office. The MDC-T has resorted to even buy Zanu-PF cards for its members in order to protect them, according to recent reports.

The only way for these reports to be verified, as the MDC-T has long demanded, is for international monitors to be placed in the country and be ready to quickly deploy to such incidents to verify for themselves what happened - instead of relying on partisan police investigators who have been known to fabricate evidence to protect Zanu-PF or to frame the MDC-T.

But the MDC-T's calls for monitors seem to fall on the deaf ears of the SADC facilitator, South African President Jacob Zuma, whose own government is also accused of protecting the Mugabe regime by refusing to publish a damaging report on political violence in a previous elections which was commissioned by former President Thabo Mbeki.

Mugabe's secretary for administration, Didymus Mutasa, was reportedly accused in cabinet of being behind the violence, as he is the one being challenged by the father of the murdered boy, Shepherd Maisiri, the local deputy organising secretary of the MDC-T in Headlands. A litany of cases of political violence have taken place in Mutasa's constituency, including intra-Zanu-PF political violence in which he was again fingered.

Education Minister David Coltart of the splinter MDC party reportedly lamented the environment being created in the country by the police clampdown on short-wave radios, which is being implemented by the partisan police, clearly in support of Zanu-PF's wish that people should not listen to external broadcasts which expose the excesses of the regime.

The ban on short-wave radios is obviously the preserve of the Minister of Information, but the Minister, Shamu is clearly happy that all Zimbabweans should only listen to propaganda from the equally partisan Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation which dominates the radio and TV airwaves, and read partisan newspapers from the Zimbabwe Newspapers Group - comprising the national daily, The Herald and its sister newspapers the Sunday Mail, the Chronicle, and the Manica Post.

Appealing for peace in the meeting, Prime Minister Tsvangirai said his party did not have a retributive agenda, so Zanu-PF did not have to go to the lengths of killing people to stay in power. The cabinet called on the police to investigate the atrocities and to be more objective, but they cannot be objective since they have refused to implement an SADC-proposed reform of the security sector which would make it neutral.

The Police Commissioner General, Augustine Chihuri, publicly extols members of his force to fight against a "regime-change agenda" which is a euphemism for the Movement for Democratic Change - a popular political party that has challenged Zanu-PF's hegemony since 2000 and has only failed to unseat it because of political violence.

The African Union recognised these repressive acts in 2008 when pictures of a tortured Morgan Tsvangirai were splashed all over the world by a journalist who was immediately murdered - obviously by Zanu-PF agents as a way of silencing he media.

At its Sham-el-Sheik Summit in 2008, the AU appointed the SADC to find a resolution, which led to negotiations and the Global Political Agreement which Mugabe has persisted in tearing up at every corner, including a refusal to reform the media and the police and a refusal to recognise the MDC-T as a genuine political party, despite the numbers at its rural and urban rallies, which far outnumber the Zanu-PF rented and coerced crowds.

The MDC-T has also been recognised globally and in Africa as a genuine political party, but it has tried to maintain dialogue internally with Zanu-PF, and has even called for the removal of sanctions imposed by the West on its leaders in the hope of appeasing Zanu-PF to engage in genuine dialogue.

But this has clearly failed as Zanu-PF is again resorting to its same old tactics - throwing away a decade of negotiations and engagement with the international community and regional organisations. It may well be time for Tsvangirai to change tact and start calling for the International Criminal Court to probe Zanu-PF and for sanctions to be tightened if an internationally sanctioned force is not allowed into the country.