President Robert Mugabe signed a unity deal with the opposition last month that allows him to keep his job but which has his generals worried about their future as they press him to protect them, writes. His cronies, in the Cabinet who would lose power, are balking. As Zimbabwe descends into financial and humanitarian chaos, Mugabe appears content just to wait for the opposition to yield to his demand for more choice Cabinet seats, writes CELIA W. DUGGER

ZIMBABWE'S military commanders have pressed President Robert Mugabe to shield them from prosecution for the violent crackdown on his political foes this year, senior government officials say, and his response is threatening to derail a power-sharing deal that was supposed to halt the country's dizzying downward economic spiral.

Mugabe's efforts to placate his generals, as well as senior politicians in his party who are disgruntled about their loss of clout, culminated in his decision last week to unilaterally claim control of ministries that have been pivotal to his 28 years of unbroken political dominance and are seen as critical to protecting his senior generals from the risk of being charged with crimes.

Mugabe, 84, signed an agreement on Sept 15 to share power with the political opposition after a brutal election season in which more than 100 opposition supporters were murdered and thousands were beaten -- a campaign of violence that senior officials in Mugabe's party said was organised by the military.

Since the agreement was signed, the country's three senior military commanders have worried about their fate under a unity government that includes the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister -- a man they deeply distrust, who was himself viciously beaten by the police last year.
In addition to his retention of control of the armed forces, Mugabe's insistence on retaining the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees a police force that could potentially investigate and arrest those responsible for political violence, threatens to destroy the deal.

Tsvangirai told supporters in Harare on Sunday that he would not be part of a deal that did not give his party control of the Home and Finance Ministries -- and he denounced what he termed Mugabe's "power grab".

Thabo Mbeki, the ousted president of South Africa, who brokered the power-sharing deal, met on Tuesday with Mugabe and Tsvangirai to try to rescue the accord. But Mbeki's own clout is now greatly diminished by his precipitous fall from power last month as leader of South Africa, the regional superpower.

Zimbabwean Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu disputed the idea that the military commanders feared prosecution.

"President Mugabe is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and head of the security ministries," he said. "There is no one guilty here. No one is talking about arrests of anyone. The army is apolitical."

According to other senior officials in the government, however, three days after Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed their deal, Mugabe huddled with the inner circle of generals and politicians who run the country with him, known as the Joint Operations Command.

Even without the pressure from his top generals and officials, Mugabe may well have been unwilling to relinquish control of core ministries. But on that day, he asked them what they thought of the deal. His military commanders told him they feared it would leave them vulnerable to prosecution for their role in organising the crackdown before the June runoff election -- a crackdown so sweeping that it prompted Tsvangirai to quit the race days before it was held, saying none of his supporters should have to die to vote for him.

"They said it was too risky to leave the repercussions of such an apparently brutal operation to chance," said a Mugabe confidant.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader, have developed a surprisingly comfortable relationship over months of negotiations, and in the days after the deal was signed, Tsvangirai said the octogenarian leader had complained that he was getting a lot of resistance to the deal from within his own party.

"But if he's getting pressure from his own party, so are we," Tsvangirai said in an interview.



The passions within Tsvangirai's own party were on display on Aug 26 when Mugabe inaugurated Parliament, where, for the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980, the opposition had the majority. Opposition members, many of whom had been in hiding for months, shouted over and over, "You are a murderer!"

Mugabe's hands trembled.

At the rally on Sunday, Tsvangirai sought to reassure Mugabe's party that the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, would not seek retribution. "The guilty are afraid," he said, "but the MDC means well."

Still, as the generals are said to have noted, the 30-page agreement signed a month ago with great fanfare before heads of state from across southern Africa includes no explicit promise of immunity for political crimes.

Tsvangirai put his name to the document, though he had not yet reached an understanding about how he and Mugabe would divide the ministries, said an opposition official close to the confidential talks.

Mbeki, the mediator, convinced Tsvangirai that agreeing to a framework for governing would build confidence.

"It was to tie Morgan's and Mugabe's hands together and their feet together until they realised they have to cohabitate," the opposition official said.

The next day, at a meeting of his party's politburo, Mugabe came under withering fire for surrendering too much authority, politburo members said.

The deal was unpopular with both of the main factions in the party: one led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, 62, a former security chief who ran Mugabe's campaign for the election runoff; the other led by Joice Mujuru, 53, one of Mugabe's two vice-presidents, and her husband, Solomon Mujuru, 59, a former army commander.

The Mujuru camp complained that Joice Mujuru had been reduced to a figurehead in the deal.

Both factions saw the agreement as threatening their control over patronage that they need to win elections, according to a senior official close to Mugabe. And both were angling for the most powerful jobs from a shrinking pie of ministerial appointments. Under the deal, Zanu-PF, Mugabe's party, was entitled to only 15 of the 31 ministries.



Mugabe got another earful when he met on Sept 18 with the Joint Operations Command, the inner circle. The commissioners of the police and of prisons, Augustine Chihuri and Paradzai Zimondi, and the director-general of the Central Intelligence Organisation, Happyton Bonyongwe, said the opposition would not want to violate the spirit of the deal by seeking prosecutions, according to officials who were present.

A senior official close to Mugabe who attended the meeting explained that the police were not so worried about prosecution because their vulnerability stemmed more from negligence -- that they did not stop the violence or arrest its perpetrators. Nor had the prison services participated directly in the violence. And the intelligence agents, because they dress in plain clothes, are less recognisable.

"The CIO agents are faceless," he said. "The problem is with the uniformed forces, because their names are out there with the people." -- NYT