South African President Thabo Mbeki Thursday pronounced the progress of negotiations between President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU(PF) party and the pro-democracy opposition Movement for Democratic Change as having proceeded "very well indeed." Mbeki, appointed in March by a summit of the 14-nation regional bloc Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate in talks to end the political crisis in Zimbabwe was speaking after his first meetings in Harare with Mugabe and MDC leaders since the initiative began, according to dpa. On his way to Kampala, Uganda, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Mbeki held two separate 40 minute meetings with the 83-year-old Zimbabwean leader and MDC officials, whose identities were not immediately known. He said he had met the two parties "so we can reflect on where we are now, and I can report to them my own perspective as to where we are going. "It has gone very well indeed," he said. However, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the larger of two factions into which the opposition split in 2005, was already in Kampala to lobby support for his party and on Wednesday said the talks were "stalled." The mediation process came out of a crisis meeting of SADC leaders in March, after Zimbabwean security forces violently broke up a proposed prayer rally in Harare, and brutally assaulted Tsvangirai and other MDC and civic leaders at length. Mugabe later said his opponents, many of them with broken limbs and severe internal injuries, "got what they deserved." Since then, senior officials of the parties have met repeatedly in South Africa, under strict confidentiality, but sources have said there appears to be some progress in debate on a new constitution. But sources also said major obstacles remain over the MDC's demands for radical reforms to state security laws, restrictions on the media and electoral systems that the opposition says are deeply biased in favour of the ruling party. The MDC inflicted the first electoral defeat on Mugabe in February 2000, by winning a "no" vote in a referendum on a draft of new constitution. Mugabe immediately responded with a campaign of violent repression against the labour-based MDC, with scores murdered and thousands tortured and maimed. ZANU(PF) has won all three subsequent general and presidential elections, which Western governments and civic groups, as well as the Commonwealth, have dismissed as neither free nor fair.
