Even as the hope for successful negotiations in Zimbabwe continue to fade away as the sides remain far apart, both Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change are increasingly fraught with dissent from within as to whether power sharing is even desirable. More ominously, there are signs that some of the opposition is pretty rabid. The ZANU-PF divisions are most worrisome because Mugabe has never seemed especially committed to the negotiating process and his ZANU-PF henchmen have most often been the source of the country's worst political violence in recent years.
All of this happens against a backdrop of economic catastrophe that has seriously diminished the reach and extent of the media. Analysts have described Zimbabwe as going through an “information dark age.” Of course this cuts several ways — while the lack of access to media would under ordinary circumstances be alarming, since so much of the media is controlled by the state, the de facto news blackout conditions undercut Mugabe's propaganda machine. If negotiations fall apart, and no one is able to hear it, does it make a sound?
