EDUCATION Minister David Coltart says Western sanctions on Zimbabwe are “past their sell-by-date” and are now being used by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party to hinder the full implementation of a 2008 power sharing agreement.

Coltart, who describes his relationship with Mugabe over the last 30 years as “chequered”, also insists in a BBC interview that the pact signed following disputed and violence-marred elections was the only non-violent option available to the President’s rivals.

Asked by the BBC’s HARDtalk host Stephen Sackur if he thought sanctions should be lifted, Coltart replied: “They were largely symbolic, there were never any economic sanctions against Zimbabwe, they were targeted against individual members. Those who imposed these sanctions gave so much notice for example on the financial sanctions that most Zanu PF hierarchy actually got their money out, so they never really had any impact in the first place.

“Ironically, my view now is that sanctions are being used most effectively by Zanu PF. They use sanctions as the reason why they should not implement other clauses in the [power sharing] agreement. So to that extent, I believe sanctions are past their sell-by-date.”

Mugabe's party has refused to move on key government appointments until sanctions are lifted -- referencing a clause in the Global Political Agreement which implores the power sharing partners to campaign for their removal.

Coltart said the European Union and the United States had shown “understandable scepticism” about a power sharing arrangement which retains President Mugabe, but rails against what he sees as a “purist approach” to Zimbabwe – an approach not exercised anywhere else where countries are coming out of conflict situations.

“They are very sceptical, and I understand why they are sceptical,” Coltart said in the interview which aired on Tuesday and Wednesday. “They view Robert Mugabe as a wily politician. I think that they are wrong. I think they are trying to be purist in their approach. They didn’t apply that standard to the Good Friday Agreement [in Northern Ireland] ...

“If people in Ireland said they weren’t going to enter into an agreement because of what the IRA had done in the past, there would never have been a Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland would be stuck in the mire still.

“If you go back to the Second World War, if you adopted a purist approach, [Winston] Churchill would have never spoken to [Joseph] Stalin. We came to the same point in our history, and you’ve got to put the past aside in many respects to move ahead.

“We had a much bigger danger facing our nation, namely total collapse, degeneration ... and to that extent, I don’t believe that the international community has given this arrangement a chance.”

Coltart, a long-time critic of Mugabe – first as a human rights lawyer and later as an MP – defended the pact signed between Mugabe’s Zanu PF party and the two rival MDC factions led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara.

“It’s been in many respects a tense relationship. It’s very hard to trust anyone who has been responsible for gross human rights violations,” Coltart, a senior member of Mutambara’s MDC, said of his own personal relationship with the President. “But what applies nationally, applies personally. We had no other viable non-violent option other than to go into this arrangement, and to that extent we have to put history aside and work in the interests of the nation -- and that includes working with Robert Mugabe.”