The Mdc Leader Has Survived Jail, Beatings and Attempts on His Life

Morgan Tsvangirai is often described as a brave and charismatic man, qualities that have stood him in good stead as he has suffered beatings and assassination attempts while battling to unseat Robert Mugabe.

But the opposition leader's dramatic withdrawal from the presidential runoff yesterday marked a change from his earlier defiant certainty that democracy would eventually triumph over dictatorship, despite Mugabe's "political thuggery" in the elections.

Tsvangirai has often articulated the difficulties in his country: "Democracy is an orphan in Zimbabwe," he wrote in the Guardian in April. "Since the infamous universal declaration of independence in 1965 made by the white government of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia - in an effort to block the extension of suffrage to the country's black majority - the cry of democracy has been ignored. Mugabe's 28-year rule has similarly undermined the development of institutional democracy."

Tsvangirai, 56, is the son of a bricklayer and the eldest of nine children, and had little formal education. A mine worker who joined Mugabe's then popular and victorious Zanu-PF party on independence from Britain in 1980, he rose to become secretary-general of the powerful Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, later leading it away from its alliance with the ruling party.

In 1997, he led a series of strikes that forced Mugabe to cancel tax increases to pay for war veterans' pensions.

A year later he narrowly escaped being thrown out of his 10th-floor office window by a group of veterans. Tsvangirai founded the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, but lost the 2002 presidential election to Zanu-PF amid allegations that Mugabe had rigged the polls.

In 2004, he was acquitted of treason for an alleged plot to assassinate Mugabe in the run up to the 2002 race, the prosecution's case resting on the testimony of a shadowy consultant who allegedly taped the MDC leader asking him to arrange Mugabe's assassination. Tsvangirai's lawyers said the tape was doctored.

Last year he was beaten again, pictures of his badly swollen face enhancing his reputation for defiance in the face of official brutality.

Early this month Tsvangirai was detained and accused of threatening public security by addressing a gathering without prior authorization.

Not for the first time, he faced criticism yesterday that he had been naive and that by withdrawing from the race he had made it harder to carry on resisting Mugabe. Some also attacked him for authoritarian tendencies within the MDC. But he has long argued that others needed to do more to tackle Zimbabwe's crisis.

"How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths?" Tsvangirai asked in his Guardian article. "Why is it that a supposed 'war on terror' ignores the very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by Mugabe?"