INTERVIEW - Zimbabwe's human rights has improved - Tsvangirai

By Jason Webb

VALLADOLID, Spain (Reuters) - Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said on Friday people could live in peace in Zimbabwe since the formation of a power-sharing government.

He said that while there were some "toxic issues" for the government he formed with old foe Robert Mugabe this year, he hoped his party could make progress working with the veteran president and eventually be elected in its own right.

"If you were to have come to Zimbabwe last year between March and June, the level of human rights abuses was far higher and now people can live in peace," Tsvangirai told Reuters in the northern Spanish city of Valladolid where he was due to receive a prize for lifetime achievement.

"There has been substantive progress, it's just that you have got one or two incidents and then it spoils the thing."

Tsvangirai formed the unity government with Mugabe to try to end a violent political crisis.

Tsvangirai himself was a victim of abuses under Mugabe's government, and was once so badly beaten that his face was barely unrecognisable.

Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, is blamed by critics for plunging his country, once the bread basket of southern Africa, into poverty through mismanagement and corruption.

He has accused his Western foes of ruining the economy through sanctions in retaliation for a policy of seizing white-owned farms for landless blacks.