Ballot rigging fears cast shadow over Zimbabwe polling day 28/03/2008 - 16:06:11
Zimbabwe goes to the polls tomorrow amid hopes of a change from the ruinous rule of president Robert Mugabe and fears of vote rigging on a massive scale.
Tonight, even as the opposition accused Mugabe of plotting to steal the vote, security chiefs loyal to him put on a show of force.
Soldiers escorted armoured cars and water cannon through Harare. The chiefs of police, army, air force, prison service and the intelligence agency all warned any attempts to demonstrate against the result of the ballot would be squashed.
Mugabe is facing his toughest challenge since he won power following a seven-year liberation war that ended white minority rule in 1980.
His collapsing economy has been a key campaign issue, the country has the world’s highest inflation rate of more than 100,000%, and he faces both opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, 55, and former ruling party loyalist and finance minister Simba Makoni, 58.
Mr Tsvangirayi today urged supporters at a rally to stay at polling stations until they closed and the counting began, to help prevent vote rigging.
“They would not rig in front of you,” he said. “We have won this election already. What’s left is for us to defend our vote.”
People shouted slogans against Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and waved banners saying “Mugabe must go.”
Mr Tsvangirayi claimed Mugabe’s party was paying polling agents billions to falsify results. “Take the billions but don’t betray Zimbabweans,” he urged.
Yesterday the opposition leader appealed to soldiers, intelligence agents, police and other public servants not to participate in fraud. “Mugabe cannot rig elections by himself,” he said. “If someone tells you to falsify the results of the elections, ignore the instructions, because it is unlawful. Don’t be used to do something shameful.”
Mugabe has denied the charges, saying on state television: “They want to tell lies, lies.”
In their first joint statement, Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Makoni said that separate scrutiny of voters’ lists showed severe discrepancies that open the way for fraud.
They had yet to receive full nationwide voters’ lists but said partial lists showed enough problems to indicate “a very well thought out and sophisticated plan to steal the election from us,” Mr Makoni said at a joint news conference.
Independent monitors and opposition officials have shown reporters voters’ rolls including dead people like Ian Smith – the last white prime minister of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence in 1980, who died last year in South Africa – and his former law and order minister Desmond Lardner-Burke, who died nearly 30 years ago.
Also listed are the first two opposition activists assassinated during the 2000 election campaign, and two white farmers killed during government-sanctioned seizures of white-owned farmland.
In one northern Harare district thousands of ghost voters were listed on hundreds of vacant lots – at a rate of 75 per lot.
Photographs of the lots were shown to reporters, foreign diplomats and regional African election observers.
Arthur Mutambara, head of a breakaway faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, said that Mugabe’s opponents set aside their political differences to challenge election organisers and regional observers to stop vote rigging which he said could spur “dire consequences” that might include violent revolt.
Zimbabwe has barred international observers from the US and the European Union from Saturday’s vote. Several international media organisations also have been barred from covering the elections.
Mugabe is accused of trying to buy votes by handing out tractors, generators and state-subsidised food in the country suffering an economic meltdown with inflation of more than 100,000%.
The agriculture-based economy was disrupted when Mugabe launched his land reforms in 2000, forcefully taking fertile farms from the country’s white minority for distribution to the country’s black majority.
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