MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai on allegations that he plotted to eliminate President Mugabe
Morgan Tsvangirai
February 14, 2002
We reiterate that we have never taken part in any conspiracy to assassinate President Mugabe and have no desire to do so. We believe in the electoral process and the change of governments through the ballot box.
As regards the allegations being leveled against us, in addition to the statement released yesterday, we comment as follows:
We confirm that the MDC was approached by Dickens and Madison a Montreal based Political Consultancy which said that it wanted to help build MDC’s image abroad but mainly in North America where Mugabe was said to be winning the propaganda war through his lobbyist group Cohen and Woods, which according to Dickens and Madison was paid the sum of US$5m for the purpose of repairing Zanu PF’s image.
Dickens and Madison approached the MDC through a gentleman called Rupert Johnson who came through Renson Gasela, MDC Shadow minister for Agriculture. The two had known each other during the days when Renson Gasela was the general manager of the Zimbabwe’s Grain Marketing Board, GMB and Rupert Johnson was a commercial trader based in South Africa.
We wish to make the point that the initiative to engage this political consultancy as MDC lobbyists was not an MDC initiative. It was solely at their own initiative, insistence and request that Dickens and Madison were engaged as MDC lobbyists.
Pursuant to Dickens and Madison’s approach to the MDC, a total of four meetings were held with the Consultancy. At the very first meeting Mr. Ari Ben-Menashe introduced himself and went on to say that the group wanted to help MDC on the communications front. He went on to explain that some two years ago the group had been hired by the Clinton administration to negotiate an exit package for President Mugabe who initially accepted the package but later on went on to renege on the agreement before the parliamentary elections.
There were three subsequent meetings held after the first meeting. A total of four meetings were held all in all. During the first three meetings, there was no mention of elimination or assassination of President Mugabe by Dickens and Madison. The meetings centred on two main issues. The first one was the need to bridge the communications gap abroad but mainly in North America where Dickens and Madison were said to be fighting Zanu PF’s propaganda war. At no stage, during the first three meetings was the issue of elimination or assassination ever discussed.
The allegation by Dickens and Madison that the MDC conceded that it had no confidence of winning the upcoming election of the presidency of Zimbabwe because of the land issue is blatantly false.
It is in fact Dickens and Madison who brought a series of poll surveys that demonstrated that MDC was going to win the upcoming presidential election with a landslide majority.
At the fourth meeting, Mr Menashe kept on wandering from the issues discussed previously. He and his team and from nowhere introduced discussion around the issue of elimination and kept on asking strange questions. It was at this stage that I burst out of the meeting for the reason that Mr Menashe was introducing issues, which had nothing to do with the objectives of their engagement as communication lobbyists. Dickens and Madison do not dispute the fact that I burst out of their meeting when I became disturbed by the approach they were taking in this meeting.
After the fourth meeting I briefed my colleagues about the suspicious conduct of Dickens and Madison at the last meeting. We then carried out a research to ascertain the background and possible motive of Mr Ben-Menashe and his company in initiating dialogue with us.
We was established that Mr Menashe had actually written a book on dirty political tricks and that he had been hired by the Zanu government to set up the MDC under the guise that they wanted to be engaged as MDC lobbyists. It was also established that from day one, the group had been working with Mr Nicholas Goche the Minister of National Security and Mr George Charamba, the Permanent Secretary in the department of Information and Publicity in the President’s Office.
When these facts became known to the party, the MDC cut off all communication with this group as far back as December 2001.
The MDC remains committed to peaceful and constitutional change of government as evidenced by the fact that the party will contest the forthcoming presidential election, which it is confident of winning. We therefore remain focused on our campaign programme and will not be diverted by side issues.
Morgan Tsvangirai
President MDC
Harare
February 14, 2002
Zimbabwe plot video 'a smear'
Richard Norton-Taylor and Andrew Meldrum in Harare
Guardian
Thursday February 14, 2002
The man behind claims that the Zimbabwe opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was involved in a plot to kill President Robert Mugabe has a reputation as a notorious fantasist, it emerged last night.
Ari Ben-Menashe, who was once employed as a junior officer in Israeli intelligence, claimed that his Montreal-based firm, Dickens and Madson, was approached last year by someone acting on behalf of Mr Tsvangirai to help the Zimbabwe opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mr Ben-Menashe described the firm as a "political consultancy" and "lobbyist" and said he had known Mr Mugabe for some time. In a statement last night, the company said its senior staff had "extensive contacts" with "intelligence agencies around the world".
An Australian television network, SBS, broadcast a grainy video last night purported to be of a meeting between Mr Tsvangirai, Mr Ben-Menashe and other company officials in Montreal last December. It suggested that those present discussed how to remove Mr Mugabe from power.
Last night, Mr Tsvangirai called the tape "contrived".
"There is no substance to the allegations," he said. "It is a smear job. I had discussions about different scenarios that might happen in Zimbabwe. I have discussed how the transition to democracy will go if I am elected. The quotes could easily have been manipulated to be taken out of context."
Mr Ben-Menashe, said he met Mr Tsvangirai twice in London last November. He said the opposition leader did not know the Montreal meeting was being videotaped.
Asked how SBS got hold of the video, he replied: "That is neither here nor there."
Mr Ben-Menashe met diplomats in Harare more than two years ago, indicating that he had business with the Mugabe government long before the video was shot.
The film-maker, Mark Davis, arrived in Zimbabwe in January on a tourist visa, without journalist accreditation, but then managed to get an interview with Mr Mugabe - something a journalist without accreditiation could not do.
Time magazine has called Mr Ben-Menashe a "veteran spinner of stunning-if-true-but yarns". He has been ruthlessly attacked in �Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and New Republic.
He was also the main source of allegations made in 1991 by an award-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, about the late Robert Maxwell, Mirror Group journalists, the abduction of the Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, and assorted arms deals.
Mr Ben-Menashe first came to light when he was acquitted by a New York federal jury in 1990 of charges that he had illegally sold Israeli-owned C-130 Hercules aircraft to Iran. The sale, he said, was part of a US-sanctioned deal to win the release of American hostages.
He made unproven claims about Irangate and about October Surprise - a claim that Ronald Reagan's campaign team had arranged a deal with Iran and Israeli officials to delay the release of US hostages held in Tehran until after the presidential election in November 1980.
Mr Tsvangirai's spokesman, Learnmore Jongwe, said in a statement yesterday that the Montreal company had been hired by the MDC, but that it now worked for the Mugabe regime. He said the "false" claim that Mr Tsvangirai had discussed assassination in the meeting "seems to arise from Dickens and Madson".
"Mr Tsvangirai did take part in a meeting with Dickens and Madson in Montreal in December. He came to suspect that he was being secretly videotaped. There was no plot to assassinate Mugabe," Mr Jongwe said.
The statement included other alleged examples of smear tactics against the MDC, including claims that it was planning a civil war and that it was responsible for South Africa's biggest bank robbery.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
