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Chicago Tribune
By Paul Salopek | Chicago Tribune correspondent
June 29, 2008

To a nation living on its knees, violence-plagued polls seem a death knell

JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s shattered opposition released its roll call of dead last week.

The list, e-mailed to the international media, was clearly prepared in haste. It contains the kind of typographical errors that arise, one imagines, from taking fast dictation. The language is as flat and terse as a small-town police report. Still, for the first time, people who died in Zimbabwe’s recent political agonies now have the dignity of being named.

The chilling details of these largely invisible murders—in which all but four of the 85 victims were members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, while most of the accused killers belong to President Robert Mugabe’s youth militias—are as good an elegy as any for the death of a democracy.

But the brief recountings of other political killings—a man assaulted while sitting down to dinner, others attacked while tending their shop, working in a flour mill, or puttering in a garden—hint at the strangely workaday, domestic quality of life in Zimbabwe even as it morphs into what now more than ever resembles a bald-faced dictatorship.

The final blow to democratic hopes came Friday, when a widely condemned runoff election promised to reinstall Mugabe in power. Diplomats now predict that up to a million new refugees, hungry and desperate, may flood out of the free-falling wreck called Zimbabwe in the coming year. On the death list are some who won’t get that chance.

Nobody knows what will happen next in moribund Zimbabwe.

Financial Times
By Tony Hawkins in Harare and Tom Burgis in Johannesburg
June 28 2008

Voters in Zimbabwe’s main cities boycotted yesterday’s presidential polls in defiance of the threat of reprisals against anyone not voting for the only candidate: Robert Mugabe.

“None of us are bothering to vote,” said Angela, a young hairdresser. “I don’t know anyone who is.”

Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliament observer mission, said queues at polling stations in Harare - the capital and an MDC stronghold - were much smaller than they were for the first-round March election. Then the autocratic Mr Mugabe was beaten into second place by Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

“The turnout is very, very low,” Mr Khumalo said. “We have not yet seen the ingredients necessary to make the poll free and fair.”

David Coltart, an MDC senator in Bulawayo, another MDC stronghold, said that all but two of the 15 polling stations he had visited were deserted.

It was a different story in some of Harare’s densely populated townships - which have been targeted by militias loyal to Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF - where there were long queues of people waiting to vote by mid-morning. State radio reported that at one rural polling station crowds of people “could not wait” to endorse Mr Mugabe.

Independent information from rural areas, which include Zanu-PF’s heartlands, was scarce because of poor communications and an absence of observers.

“Lots of people were planning to boycott the elections, or to spoil their ballots or vote for Tsvangirai,” said a diplomatic source from Har-are. “But we also hear that the military will be frogmarching people to go to vote.”

The Zimbabwean
Thursday, 26 June 2008

The ruling party in Zimbabwe has a detailed plan to murder opposition polling agents, bomb polling stations and march the electorate to the ballot box under armed guard to ensure an emphatic victory for Robert Mugabe in tomorrow’s uncontested presidential run-off.

Minutes of a meeting of the regime’s top security officials, the Joint Operations Command (JOC), seen by The Independent, outline the ruthless strategy which appears to be going ahead regardless of the withdrawal of the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from the race.

The notes, leaked from a JOC meeting late last week, include instructions to kill opposition MPs, for death squads to stuff ballot boxes in rural areas and the prevention of any rallies by the opposition. Detailed instructions were included on how to rig the vote: “Voters in a ward should surrender their IDs to the village head, and have their names taken down. On the day of voting, the respective village heads should queue outside the polling station with each member [voter] with a respective number. Each voter shall profess ignorance of the ability to write on his/her own… agents in the polling stations will be helping in marking X.”
Many opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MPs have been forced into hiding and several more were seeking to cross the border last night after learning of execution orders given to death squads.

“War veterans have been instructed to kill all the MDC mps [sic] working in cahoots with the Army and the CIO [Central Intelligence Organisation],” the minutes recorded. “Every mp [sic] shall not tread the ground or the soils of his constituency.”
The MDC’s decision to boycott the presidential run-off in the hope of exposing the election-rigging and calming the terror campaign appears to have been ignored, raising fears that the violence unleashed to keep the present regime in office is out of control.

New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 11 • June 26, 2008
By Joshua Hammer

1.
On a clear spring afternoon in Harare in mid-May, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, paid a call on Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s beleaguered dictator, six weeks after Zimbabwe’s tumultuous elections on March 29 in which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai claimed a clear victory over Mugabe. Mbeki had been largely silent as Zimbabwe descended into chaos. In mid-April, while Mugabe’s handpicked Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) refused to release the final vote count, and Mugabe’s War Veterans marched through the streets in an intimidating display of force, Mbeki had stood hand in hand with Mugabe outside the presidential residence in Harare and denied that the country was in “crisis.”

In recent days, however, as evidence grew of widespread beatings and killings of supporters of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Mbeki had found himself under attack in the press and at odds with members of his own party leadership. Jacob Zuma, the chairman of the African National Congress and Mbeki’s likely successor to the presidency of South Africa, had criticized the delayed vote count and said that an April raid on MDC headquarters made the country look like “a police state.” The Johannesburg newspaper Business Day revealed that Mbeki had several years earlier ignored a report by two South African judges describing widespread cheating by Mugabe’s ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF), in the 2002 parliamentary election. Now, with the electoral commission’s official results showing that Tsvangirai had defeated Mugabe by 47.9 percent to 42.3 percent—necessitating a runoff election—Mbeki faced mounting pressure to support a free and fair second round.

Kenyannewswebsite.wordpress.com
By Tom Burgis in Johannesburg
June 25 2008

For the huddled congregation at the Central Methodist Mission in downtown Johannesburg, the wait for a saviour goes on.
Many of the more than 2,000 Zimbabweans who have sought sanctuary at the church in the South African capital are coming to terms with the fact that Morgan Tsvangirai will not contest Friday’s presidential run-off election against Robert Mugabe.

Reflecting some of the initial anger Godfrey Charamba, the chairman of the refugees sitting beneath an enormous crucifix in the main hall had said on Sunday, hours after Mr Tsvangirai’s decision: “He is letting down the hope of the people.”

The exiles’ initial outrage gives way to more sober sentiments closer to the epicentre of the violence. Bella Matambanadzo, head of George Soros’ Open Society Initiative’s Zimbabwe programme, said on Tuesday that in Harare “there is a feeling that the MDC has done absolutely the most responsible thing”.

In the south-west, however, where there have been fewer attacks, “a lot of people said they wanted to vote against Mugabe and have been denied”, says David Coltart, an MDC Senator for Bulawayo. “But they have not been brutalised the way people in the north have.”

He says Mr Tsvangirai was “damned if he continued and damned if he didn’t”.

Some 1.5m Zimbabweans have poured into their ravaged homeland’s vast southern neighbour since 2005, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch. Other estimates put the total as high as 3m – almost equivalent to the population of Cape Town.

They are caught in a dangerous limbo, pinioned between atrocities and economic ruination at home and the mobs that have stalked Johannesburg in recent weeks, killing dozens of African foreigners, brutalising hundreds more and sending streams of migrants from squatter camps into refuges such as the Methodist mission.

SW Radio Africa Zimbabwe news
By Violet Gonda
24 June 2008

Morgan Tsvangirai has officially resigned from the presidential run-off. MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said the party had personally handed a letter to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission on Tuesday afternoon. He said the MDC would now wait for a response from the electoral commission. Chamisa added that the party would not endorse or recognize the election and the results thereof.

However the Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa has told AFP new agency the run off election will go ahead as planned on Friday despite Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the presidential the race.

Chinamasa is quoted saying: “Any withdrawal verbal or written is a nullity,” adding that if Tsvangirai had wanted to pull out of the race he should have done so 21 days before the first round of voting on March 29.

Tsvangirai first announced his withdrawal at a press conference on Sunday, saying politically motivated violence has made it impossible for a free and fair poll. Scores of MDC members have been killed, tens of thousands injured, arrested, displaced and the government retribution against its perceived opponents is continuing, despite worldwide condemnation.

The MDC leader himself has sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare.

Despite overwhelming evidence of violence on the ground Chinamasa told the AFP political violence was not so bad as to affect the outcome of the polls.

Meanwhile independent legal opinions commissioned by the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) have said the run-off should have been held by April and therefore the delay and the absence of a lawful run-off means the candidate who received the most votes in the first round should be declared the winner. That would of course be Morgan Tsvangirai.