Voters intimidated in Zimbabwe election

6/28/2008 - 8:37:00 AM

Roaming bands of government supporters heckled, harassed and threatened people into voting in a run-off election in which Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was the only candidate, ensuring he will remain in power despite international condemnation of the balloting as a sham.

Marshals led voters to polling stations while rural voters faced arson threats.

“What is happening today is not an election. It is an exercise in mass intimidation,” said opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who withdrew from the runoff against Mugabe after intense state-sponsored violence.

World leaders roundly condemned the vote amid reports of a low turnout despite the intimidation.

“The people of Zimbabwe have been deprived of their right to vote freely and thus deprived of their dignity,” said EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at a meeting in Japan, said the US would raise possible sanctions with other members of the UN Security Council.

Mugabe, who has been president since independence in 1980, is believed to want a large turnout so he can claim an overwhelmingly victory over Tsvangirai, whose name remained on the ballot because electoral officials say his withdrawal Sunday came too late.

The 84-year-old Mugabe appeared jovial as he voted, telling a reporter in Harare he was feeling “very fit, very optimistic, upbeat and hungry.”

However, Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliament observer mission, told the BBC the mood in the capital Harare was sombre and that the turnout was low.

He said while walking in one high density suburb, observers mistook a long line of people for voters waiting at a polling station, only to find that the people were queuing for bread.

Khumalo said he had not seen signs of intimidation nor “the ingredients that make this election free and fair.”

In Harare, paramilitary police in riot gear were patrolling the city while militant Mugabe supporters were seen on the streets singing revolutionary songs, heckling people and asking why they were not voting.

“I’ve got no option but to go and vote so that I can be safe,” said a young woman selling tomatoes.

Rights activist Dusani Ncube said he had received news from rural areas outside Zimbabwe’s second city Bulawayo that people had been told to vote or their homes would be burned.

Zimbabwe was the topic of lengthy, closed-door discussions Friday in Egypt among foreign ministers gathered ahead of an African Union summit that begins Monday – one that Mugabe has said he will attend.

Some AU members say the runoff should not have been held, while others, such as regional powerhouse South Africa, refuse to publicly criticise Mugabe.

“Our position is that the parties in Zimbabwe should work together for the future of Zimbabwe,” South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told Associated Press Television News.

However, the head of South Africa’s African National Congress Jacob Zuma, in one of the few times a senior South African politician openly criticised Mugabe, said the situation in Zimbabwe was “extremely difficult and distressing".

“We reiterate that the situation is now out of control,” he said in Johannesburg, South Africa Friday. “Nothing short of a negotiated political arrangement will get Zimbabwe out of the conflict it has been plunged into.”

Foreign ministers from the powerful Group of Eight – the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Russia and Canada – closed a two-day meeting in Japan with a joint statement deploring “the actions of the Zimbabwean authorities ... which have made a free and fair presidential runoff election impossible.”

Presidents of the five-nation East African Community made a rare political comment Friday about the affairs of another African country at the end of a regular summit held in Kigali, Rwanda.

In a joint statement the presidents of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda said Zimbabwe’s one-candidate runoff, “cannot be a solution,” to the country’s political crisis.

The presidents urged Mugabe’s and Tsvangirai’s parties “to come together and work out an amicable solution through dialogue in the interest of all Zimbabweans.”

In his press conference Tsvangirai said he still wanted negotiations about a transitional authority for Zimbabwe, but was not sure whether he could talk with Mugabe.

The two leaders have been under pressure to sit down and find a solution to the crisis in Zimbabwe.

On Thursday Mugabe offered an olive branch to the opposition saying he was “open to discussion” with them.

Tsvangirai was first in a field of four in the March vote, an embarrassment to Mugabe. The official tally said he did not gain the votes necessary to avoid a run-off against Mugabe. Tsvangirai’s party and its allies also won control of parliament in March, dislodging Mugabe’s party for the first time since independence in 1980.

Mugabe was once hailed as a post-independence leader committed to development and reconciliation, but in recent years has been denounced as a dictator intent only on holding onto power through intimidation and election fraud.