South Africa will host the heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) members next week to discuss the Zimbabwe crisis in hopes of finding a way to get talks started again. As a result Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change has announced that it will not meet with Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF before that SADC summit.The MDC rationale is pretty sensible: there is no point in meeting with the opposition until something happens to indicate that Mugabe really wants to enter into serious negotiations. This seems a pretty clear shot across the bow of the SADC heads of state inasmuch as Tsvangirai obviously implicitly believes that the burden is now on the region's leaders to step up and show some teeth with regard to Mugabe.
