Opposition ready for presidential poll

Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on Sunday his two-year-old Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was confident of winning presidential elections due next year, Reuters reported.

"In MDC we have one project and that is to remove Mugabe and his cronies...we are ready for the presidential elections," Tsvangirai told about 10,000 supporters at a rally to commemorate the party's second anniversary in Zimbabwe's second city Bulawayo.

Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist, poses the stiffest challenge to President Robert Mugabe's 21-year rule in elections due by next April as the country struggles to cope with an economic crisis widely blamed on Mugabe. On Sunday he said the MDC, which has emerged as Zimbabwe's most popular opposition party since independence in 1980, remained strong despite reported internal rifts over the last few weeks, which some party members have blamed on Mugabe's ZANU-PF movement.

Last month the MDC unveiled a recovery plan aimed at pulling the country out of its worst economic crisis since independence, to be implemented if it wins next year's presidential elections. The crisis has been worsened by Zimbabwe's isolation from the international community over Mugabe's endorsement of the invasion of more than 1,000 white-owned farms since February 2000 by pro-government militants. The MDC made a near clean sweep of urban centres in the parliamentary elections, and recently won the executive mayoral election in Bulawayo.