Talks between the European Union and a delegation from Zimbabwe's unity government, postponed this week due to the on-going delays caused by the six-day airspace shutdown over Europe, are expected to involve some difficult and heated discussions once the rescheduled meeting in Brussels finally takes place.

The talks, designed to forge a reengagement between the EU and Zimbabwe, will address a number of sensitive topics such as the targeted sanctions against Robert Mugabe and over 200 allies from his Zanu-PF party, the nature of democracy and reforms in Zimbabwe and Mugabe's recent courting of Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The most pressing issue for the Zimbabweans will be the sanctions, imposed in February 2002, which banned dozens of top-ranking members of Mugabe's Zanu-PF from entering the EU, froze their assets and forbade the export of arms to Zimbabwe.

The sanctions followed the first election campaign pitting current Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai against Mugabe during which the EU argued that "serious violations of human rights" prevented the vote from being free and fair.

Sanctions at the heart of EU, Zimbabwe tensions

Relations between the EU and Zimbabwe have been strained ever since and the freeze in official discussions only began to thaw earlier this year when Development Commissioner Karel De Gucht led an EU delegation to Harare, the first official dialogue with the Zimbabwe government in seven years.

De Gucht's team held separate talks with Mugabe and Tsvangirai, but while the meetings were praised by the Europeans, the EU delegation made it clear that sanctions would remain in place while serious doubts remained about human rights abuses, the state of democracy and the stalling of political reform in Zimbabwe.

The lifting of these targeted sanctions has been at the heart of the pressure and rhetoric Mugabe and Zanu PF have levelled at the EU. But Mugabe has not been alone in calling for the end of sanctions. Since becoming prime minister when Zimbabwe's power-sharing government took office in February 2009, Tsvangirai has called for an end to the West's restrictive measures.

Thierry Vircoulon, the Central Africa Project Director for the International Crisis Group NGO in Kenya, believes that there will be no movement on sanctions by the EU at the meeting and that relations will remain tense.

"When the two sides meet, the freeze on assets and the ban on travel will not be reduced, in fact there is no chance of relations between the EU and Zimbabwe normalizing after these talks because the unity government has not made any progress in implementing the scheduled reforms and is in full disagreement right now," he told Deutsche Welle.

"The media reform did not happen - journalists are still harassed, the political intimidation continues, there have been no discussions on the land issues between MDC and Zanu-PF and none of the democratic and political reforms that are on the agenda of the unity government have materialised."

Divisions in government complicates negotiations

While discussions over the sanctions issue will be uncomfortable, just dealing with any official delegation from Zimbabwe is in itself complicated.

After a violent election campaign and the subsequent international pressure, Mugabe's isolated Zanu-PF was forced to form a government of national unity with Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the first time since independence in 1980 that Mugabe and his party did not have a monopoly on state power.

Despite returning Zimbabwe's economy to growth after economic collapse and disastrous hyperinflation, and enjoying public support, the coalition is constantly on the verge of collapse due to the internal conflicts over the running of the country and the formulation and implementation of policies.

"The problem with dealing with the Zimbabwean unity government is that it doesn't speak with one voice; it speaks with three different voices and has three different standpoints," Wilf Mbanga, the editor-in-chief of the London-based The Zimbabwean newspaper, told Deutsche Welle.

"There is the Zanu-PF, Tsvangirai's MDC and minority partner (Arthur) Mutambara's MDC-M all with different views. There is already resentment between them but there is more tension because the Zanu-PF officials can't come to Europe because of the travel bans."

Despite their best efforts to encourage change, the Europeans must deal with Mugabe if breakthroughs with Zimbabwe are to be achieved.

"European leaders have found that they can't persuade their African counterparts to isolate Mugabe or guide him into exile," Richard Gowan, an Africa expert at the European Council for Foreign Relations, told Deutsche Welle.

"This is proof of a lack of consensus between EU and AU members over how to deal with difficult regimes. European diplomats have grown more and more realistic about how much leverage they have over Zimbabwe."

Mugabe's courting of Iran inflames tensions

The divisions in the government were once again made clear last week during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Harare. Ahmadinejad's two-day visit shone the spotlight on rifts within the coalition government, with Tsvangirai's MDC party describing Mugabe's decision to invite Ahmadinejad as a "colossal political scandal" while Tsvangirai and MDC officials boycotted a welcoming ceremony for the Iranian president.

At a banquet held for Ahmadinejad in the capital, Mugabe backed Iran's controversial nuclear programme and accused the West of seeking to punish the two countries for asserting their independence.

Thierry Vircoulon believes that while Mugabe's support for Iran remains antagonistic rhetoric and does not mutate into a more dangerous relationship involving Zimbabwe's uranium deposits, the EU will just accept it as another attempt at provocation. However, it may cause further tension in Harare.

"(This Iran situation) just deteriorates Mugabe's image a bit more but, as long as it remains nothing more than official visits, this is not a problem," Vircoulon said.

However, in Zimbabwe, it adds another dimension to the tension between the ruling partners. "After all, the prime minister left the country just to avoid meeting the Iranian president and the MDC strongly condemned this visit," he added. "That in itself is a problem."

Author: Nick Amies
Editor: Rob Mudge