MDC-T to release details of GPA report this weekend

The report was handed over to the South African facilitation team on Wednesday, although the three party principals Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara received their copies last week Friday.

Nelson Chamisa, the MDC national spokesman, told SW Radio Africa on Thursday that issues covered in the report will be made public over the coming weekend.

This will be the first time ever that one of the parties involved in talks will officially reveal issues covered during negotiations, which started two years ago.

It has become normal practice for journalists to merely speculate about the talks because no information was made available as a result of a media blackout, imposed by the South Africans. A clause in the document that brought the parties to a round table specifically stated that as long as the talks were going on, neither side could directly or indirectly communicate the substance of the discussion to the media, nor use the media as a negotiating platform.

Journalists have long complained that this is a real stifling of freedom of expression, and denies Zimbabweans the right to information about a process that decides their future.

Veteran Journalist Makusha Mugabe told us that the decision by South Africa, as the mediator, to silence the media merely created stories based on mis-information speculation and half-truths.

I think we should applaud what the MDC is trying to do. These negotiations were done by a group of party representatives on behalf of all Zimbabweans who deserved to be updated on a regular basis, Mugabe said.

He added; We should have been kept abreast of developments at every stage of the negotiations. Most times the negotiators were being economic with the truth, telling us they were close to a deal while in reality theyve been worlds apart for the entire duration of the talks.

Makusha said since the talks were now officially over, he believed the MDC were no longer hamstrung by the clause in the GPA that prevented each party from divulging information.

President Zuma is expected to go over the report with his facilitation team, after which he will present it to the chairman of the SADC organ on Politics, Defence and Security, Mozambican President Armando Guebuza.

Its believed the Organ will convene an extraordinary summit that it is hoped will bring about finality to the implementation of the GPA, by imposing its own solutions.

But given the fact that most regional countries seem determined to maintain support for Robert Mugabe, that hope may not materialise.