In Conversation – Remembering Zimbabwe

Inthenews.co.uk
By Alex Stevenson
22 July 2008

Lauren St John has first-hand experience of politically inspired violence in Zimbabwe. But she still loved living in the country, where awe at its natural beauty sat side by side with an all-pervasive fear of violence and retribution. Oppression still lingers today, as Ms St John knows only too well.

I found her in reflective mood. Ms St John has just finished a memoir of her experience growing up as the daughter of a white farmer during Rhodesia’s tumultuous years of independence. Her fond memories at the farm which became the title of her book began with a tragedy, however, when her 11-year-old classmate was shot dead by guerrillas. Bruce Campbell and his family were killed by a volley of machinegun fire bursting through the walls of the Rainbow’s End farmhouse which Ms St John’s family subsequently moved into. When she moved into the house where he had lived, red blood stains were still evident on the cupboard in her bedroom.

The Campbells were victims of racist violence against the perceived colonial oppressors, but Ms St John remembers never sensing any bad feeling in the house afterwards. “My mum asked Camilla [Campbell, the surviving mother] why there’d been no bad feeling… she said it’s because there’d been so much love in the house,” she explained.

That love transferred itself to her own experiences growing up at Rainbow’s End, a thousand-acre farm which was also part game reserve. From the age of 11 to 17 she enjoyed the stunning wildlife, Jenny the giraffe and herds of wildebeest and impala. But over this experience lay the constant threat of a repeat attack. Ms St John is hugely sympathetic to opposition supporters in Zimbabwe today as a result.

“It has been so gut-wrenching to see what has happened,” she says of the recent sham runoff vote held by Zanu-PF leader Robert Mugabe.

“It’s a heartbreaking thing and what’s disturbing is that the same people that were fighting for freedom and for justice and for equality are now the same people that are destroying, have no truck for quality and seem intent in reducing the country to famine.

“It’s hard to credit what would make people who once held those kind of idealistic views now resort to such depravity.”

Violence has been an everyday occurrence in Zimbabwe, even after the June 27th second round election. Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters found themselves systematically targeted in an attempt, Ms St John alleges, at obliterating all opposition. “Operation Red Dye, it’s called,” she explained. Those who did not vote in the runoff have been targeted, many of them finished off for good.

Youth militia and Zanu-PF party officials have been confronting all those who abstained. Ms St John’s father, Errol, still works in agriculture in Zimbabwe and was himself approached by a war veteran. “He told them, legitimately thank God, that his authorised polling station was more than an hour’s journey away and he didn’t have the petrol to get to the polling station.” A lucky escape. The wife of one MDC supporter had her limbs removed before being roasted alive, she says.

MDC senator David Coltart told inthenews before the runoff vote that the persecution seen against MDC matched the horrors of the Gukuruhundi, the campaign of violence seen in 1983. The name comes from a Shona term with several definitions, along the lines of ‘the storm that sweeps away the chaff before the spring rains’ – an apt comparison, as Ms St John’s adolescence mixed wonder at the beauties of African natural life with the horrors of war. Her father returned to Zimbabwe to participate in the struggle. “Fear and elation” were her feelings on first arriving at Rainbow’s End. That dichotomy is just as valid for today’s Zimbabwe.

Ms St John says the country’s mood has changed rapidly since the aftermath of the original first-round vote. “People are so beaten and cowed,” she said. “People simply do not have the spirit or the strength to do anything.”

Agreement on talks between Mr Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a positive step forward, but Ms St John remains deeply concerned about the current situation in the country.

“The tragedy of Zimbabwe is not just the horror of what’s happening – we’re in completely uncharted economic territory,” she explained.

Hyperinflation is the problem. Last year prices rose by a ridiculous 100,000 per cent. Could things possibly get any worse? Apparently, yes. Ms St John says eight billion per cent is expected to be this year’s figure. A week ago a single egg cost Z$6 billion. Six potatoes cost Z£80 billion. “Somebody standing there with nothing – how do they begin to find that kind of money, even supposing with the empty supermarket shelves that they could find those items in the first place?”

“People are incredibly desperate, I can’t tell you. Given that a minimum of 80 per cent of people are out of a job, anyone that can get work by helping Zanu-PF probably will.”

Ms St John’s worries about the concerns of ordinary people are piercing. It is the ordinary people, with ordinary problems, who she believes often get left out beyond the headlines. What about diabetics? People with cancer? Even the dead are problematic as Zimbabwe’s mortuaries continue to fill.

“Where do they get the money to help themselves? To have a single filling costs Z$3 trillion. The country must be filled with people with just ordinary conditions.”

International condemnation is hardly helpful, she believes: “The rhetoric of the outside world is not going to be any help to somebody who has no idea where to get tonight’s food.”

The parallels continue. Optimists are hoping the MDC’s deal with Mr Mugabe over further talks could be the beginning of the end for the regime. Will those current supporters of Zanu-PF be forced to acknowledge their failed mindframe, in the same way Ms St John was forced to do over the white cause in the war of independence? Having thought she was a liberal, she was forced to confront a new truth where by definition she was a racist.

“How could I never have questioned the fact that blacks went to separate schools?” she asks. “My father loved the war and because of him I loved the war too. To me we were fighting communism.”

It is more probable, however, that the repression brought about by the “criminal cabal” running the country, as Gordon Brown puts it, will remain. Certainly there is no immediate solution to the economic crisis it faces. But even today it is that climate of fear that lingers.

“As long as I remember people have been so petrified to speak out. Even your trusted friend, you’re petrified to speak to. The walls literally have ears – it’s so terrifying.”

Lauren St John was speaking to Alex Stevenson. Rainbow’s End: An African Memoir, published by Penguin, is out now in paperback priced £8.99.

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Towards a negotiated settlement in Zimbabwe

Speech given to Bulawayo Agenda meeting: President Room, Rainbow Hotel
By David Coltart
Friday18 July 2008

Introduction

It is appropriate for me to open my speech by conveying hearty congratulations to Nelson Mandela on his 90th birthday. I think I speak on behalf of all here today in wishing him continued health and happiness as he enters the twilight of his long and illustrious life. It is also appropriate to refer to Nelson Mandela in the context of today’s meeting. As terrible and as insurmountable as the problems we face in Zimbabwe appear to be today the fact is that South Africa was in a similar crisis in the late 1980s. South Africans managed to negotiate a settlement which culminated in the end of apartheid, the introduction of the new Constitution and the laying down of a new foundation on which to construct a modern, vibrant, free and democratic state. Whilst the international community played a constructive role in bringing South Africans together, ultimately it was South Africans themselves who negotiated a new beginning for South Africa.

Key to the success of the South Africa negotiations was of course the towering figure of Nelson Mandela himself. More than any other single factor it was his wisdom, his commitment to genuine reconciliation, his commitment to a peaceful resolution and, most importantly, his profound commitment to freedom, liberty and democracy that ensured the success of the negotiations. There were many occasions when the negotiations could have floundered; for example when Chris Hani was assassinated South Africa could have slipped back easily into anarchy and civil war. It took the wisdom and calm head of Nelson Mandela to pull the process through those crises.

One of the great strengths of Nelson Mandela is his humility and modestly. He has always been on the first to acknowledge that he was fortunate to be surrounded by other great leaders who also had level heads. South Africa was fortunate that it had people of the calibre of FW De Klerk, Cyril Ramaposa and Roelff Meyer involved in the negotiation process. There is no doubt that they played a key role in keeping the negotiations on track. They had the wisdom to know the right time to compromise and the right issues to compromise on. They had the strength to haul recalcitrant elements in their respective political parties along with them.

It seems almost certain that a Memorandum of Understanding will be signed next week. Whilst the MOU will undoubtedly be a positive step forward towards a negotiated settlement in Zimbabwe, may pitfalls still lie ahead and we will need Mandela-like wisdom to negotiate them.

A few weeks ago in London Nelson Mandela commented on the Zimbabwean crisis using four words which are profoundly significant as we move towards a negotiated settlement. He said that the Zimbabwean crisis was, and I quote, a “tragic failure of leadership”. At that time many took his comments as an attack on Robert Mugabe alone. However I do not believe that his comments were directed solely at Robert Mugabe. I believe that he was referring to a collective failure of leadership in Zimbabwe not just this year but over a protracted period.

It is just over 50 years since Garfield Todd’s tenure as Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia ended on the 17th of February 1958. In his farewell statement Garfield Todd said “we must make it possible for every individual to lead the good life, to win a place in the sun. We are in danger of becoming a race of fear ridden neurotics-we who live in the finest country on earth”. Those wise words have been disregarded by a succession of political leaders in Zimbabwe for the last 50 years. Zimbabwe has been blighted during the last 50 years by political leaders of all races and of all ideologies who have been guilty of the following errors of judgement:

1. They believe in physical force rather than moral force

Since the early 1960s Zimbabwean political parties have generally been led by men who believe that physical force is more important than moral force. The 1961 Constitution would have led to a gradual and orderly transition from white minority rule to majority rule but it was derailed by both black and white politicians who did not believe in compromise and who preferred to place their faith in the use of force and violence either to retain power or to acquire it. The politics of the 1960s and 1970s were marked by a shocking lack of commitment by most political leaders to seek non-violent means of resolving the then political crisis. Since 1980 we have been led by a regime that has a deep-rooted belief in and commitment to the use of violence to achieve political objectives. Tragically as so often happens under tyrannical regimes those who oppose tyranny sometimes get poisoned by tyranny and themselves replicate or mirror the methods used by the very tyrannical regimes they oppose. Zimbabwe has been no exception and I have no doubt that the struggle for freedom has been compromised periodically when we in the opposition have lapsed into the thinking that our problems may be resolved through the use of physical force and violence.

I was horrified to read recently statements made by a few senior opposition leaders which betray this thinking. One threatened a “shooting war” and went on to say that the MDC should not be blamed “when we start.” Another wrote that an option was to “pick up arms of war” and drive Mugabe out. Whilst I fully understand the deep sense of frustration which leads to statements like this being made, these utterances are irresponsible. War, or the threat of war, should never be part of our lexicon, especially during any negotiation process. That is the language we expect to hear from Mugabe – it should never come from a democrat at this juncture of our history.

All democratic political leaders must consider the legacy of the last 50 years of violence in Zimbabwe. We need to all understand that it is this continual reversion to violence which has brought our great nation to the sorry state is in today. Unless all political leaders unequivocally revoke the use or threat of violence there will never be a meaningful negotiated settlement in Zimbabwe. And it is simply no excuse for opposition leaders to threaten the use of violence or war in response to the shocking brutality exercised by this regime against the Zimbabwean people. All those threats will do is perpetuate the horrifying cycle of violence this country has experienced in the last 50 years. In short war or the threat of war is simply not an option. If the talks, which are about to commence, are to succeed that threat should never be used by anyone, certainly not by the democrats.

Accordingly if a negotiated settlement is to be achieved there needs to be a fundamental commitment to the use of non violent means to settle the political crisis henceforth. Martin Luther King in 1963 drafted a pledge for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Paragraph 8 of their pledge records a commitment to “refrain from the violence of fist, tongue or heart“. I do not believe that one can wave a fist and speak of peace at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive. And whilst of course it is ZANU PF which has been overwhelmingly responsible for most of the violence the fault does not just lie with them. We in the opposition have also on occasions been guilty of simply paying lip service to the use of non-violence. One of the greatest tragedies of the struggle for freedom during the last eight years is the fact that in the last three months several of the young men within the opposition who were suspended in 2005 for deviating from the opposition’s policy of non-violence have now themselves been brutally assassinated by the ZANU PF regime’s hit squads. I cannot help but feel that had they been led more actively along a different path they may have survived to see a new dawn of freedom and tolerance in Zimbabwe. But that is now past and we must move forward.

I should stress that whilst my sentiments in this regard are mainly rooted in principle and morality there are also practical reasons why violence and the threat of war is simply not an option, and indeed never have been. Firstly it is trite that if one is going to make a threat one should be able to carry it out if it is to carry any weight. For reasons which require another whole speech the opposition has not managed to organise mass protests against the regime so its chances of successfully organising a war are minimal. There is no public will for war. We do not have neighbouring States which would in any way support a war. So, even if one believes in war it is in reality a hollow threat so serves no purpose. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we must understand that one of our greatest strengths internationally is that we have by and large demonstrated a commitment to using peaceful, non-violent, democratic methods to achieve our political goals and that has generated immense sympathy for our cause throughout the world. The world has a limited attention span and interest and often support comes down to a simple understanding of who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are. In Zimbabwe, certainly this year, it has been very easy for the world to grasp who has been “good” and “bad”. Despite strenuous efforts made by ZANU PF to avoid responsibility for the horrors our nation has experienced since March, the world knows who is responsible and that is one of the main reasons why ZANU PF is so isolated now, even in Africa.

Accordingly if we are to negotiate a settlement there must be a profound commitment to refrain from the violence of the fist, tongue and heart by the opposition, irrespective of what ZANU PF leaders have done or are planning to do. We must recognise that we occupy the high ground morally as we enter this process and we must not lose that position by making foolhardy threats at this critical juncture.

2. They are concentrated on either the retention or acquisition of power rather than the national interest

I question what has happened to all our patriots? It seems to me that our nation has been blighted by a succession of leaders who are more concerned with their personal interests or the narrow interests of their own political parties and supporters then they are in the great nation state of Zimbabwe. This should be a great nation; it is richly endowed with bright articulate hard-working people; with rich natural resources; with the best climate in the world; it is a country of stunning natural beauty. As Garfield Todd said over 50 years ago it is indeed the finest country on earth. How can it then be that the finest country on earth is the location of one of the world’s worst nightmares? I believe that is primarily because our political leadership has for decades put selfish personal interests ahead of the national interest.

One of the reasons the Lancaster house talks did not provide a long-term resolution to Zimbabwe’s problems is because white rights were put before the entrenchment of universally recognised human rights. Instead of ensuring that the new Zimbabwean Constitution deeply rooted democratic principles there was a concentration on protecting white interests. In contrast both FW De Klerk and Roelff Meyer in the South African negotiations recognised that it was more important to entrench democracy for all than it was to seek to protect white privilege.

Likewise the reason the December 22, 1987 Unity Accord has come unstuck is because it accommodated the interests of the political leadership of ZANU PF and ZAPU rather than the general interests of the Zimbabwean people. One of the reasons there is such antipathy in Zimbabwe today regarding a government of national unity is because of the 1987 Unity Accord. The Unity Accord is viewed by most people, certainly in Matabeleland, as a settlement which benefited a few leaders that which did not entrench democracy and so lay the foundation for meaningful economic development which would benefit all Zimbabweans.

Sadly that attitude continues to this day and applies to both ZANU PF and the MDC. I fear that the current negotiations may focus on who gets what instead of what structural reforms are needed to put Zimbabwe back on the road to recovery. If the negotiations focus on how much power is either retained by ZANU PF or acquired by the MDC rather than the policy reforms needed then any settlement that arises from the negotiations will not be wholeheartedly embraced by the Zimbabwean people.

To this extent who leads the country and who is in any Cabinet is irrelevant. Let me be quite clear what I mean. Obviously the democratic will of the people of Zimbabwe as reflected in the 29th of March 2008 elections must be respected. However the problems Zimbabwe face are so severe and intractable that we cannot allow petty bickering about who gets what to derail the negotiations. All national leaders must recommit themselves to the national interest and be prepared to subordinate their personal goals and ambitions to what is in the best interests of Zimbabwe. This means that in the interests of compromise there may have to be some power-sharing mechanism during a transitional period.

In this regard let me briefly respond to the statement issued by the civil society organisations yesterday the 17 July 2007 in which they call upon a transitional government to have “leadership by a neutral body” and a transitional government “headed by an individual who is not a member of ZANU PF or MDC”. Once again whilst I appreciate the sentiment which lies behind the statement one cannot just disregard the wishes of the Zimbabwean people as expressed on the 29th of March. Our society remains deeply polarised and we cannot ignore the fact that leaders on both sides of the political divide enjoy the passionate support of their respective supporters. They have been given a mandate by their supporters and that mandate must be respected in the negotiation process. However it is because of that deep polarisation that I believe we will have to consider some interim power sharing mechanism. And it goes without saying that power-sharing involves compromise on both sides. As a lawyer who has been involved in human rights issues and who has been concerned about the problem of impunity for my entire professional life I do not like compromise on certain issues. However at this juncture of our nation’s history I do not see any alternative which will bring our nation’s tragedy to an end without further loss of blood.

The world has passed us by in the last 50 years

Tragic consequences

We need to recognise that the world is passed us by during the last 50 years. I think that Bulawayo airport stands as a monument, a constant reminder to us of our lost opportunities. It was built in the 1950s some 20 kilometres from the city centre, an island in a sea of trees and bush. It was designed that way because our city fathers anticipated that there would be great growth in Bulawayo. However it remains an island because Bulawayo and Zimbabwe has stagnated for 50 years. Indeed if anything our economy is now smaller than it was in the 1950s. We have suffered 50 years of lost opportunities and this country’s great potential has not been realised. We need to all now draw a line on the sand and move forward.

But the tragic consequences are not solely confined to economic collapse. Almost of greater concern to me is the collapse of the moral fabric of our society. We need to consider the effect of 50 years of violence on our national character. In this regard and I am not only speaking about the victims of violence but also about the perpetrators. In the last few weeks I have seen horrifying injuries inflicted on Zimbabweans by young men. Doctors say that some of these injuries are so severe that they would never occur, for example, in a traffic accident. Bones had been broken repeatedly by young men acting on the instructions of their political leaders. I have no doubt that they will be haunted by what they have done in the years that lie ahead. Scientific studies show that those who inflict violence on political opponents often go on to inflict violence on those they love including spouses and children. It is also a fact that we now have a deeply ingrained culture of violence. The Genie is out the bottle and it will be difficult to get it back in even if there is political will shown by ZANU PF. If negotiations are to succeed then not only must this violence stop immediately but other measures must be taken to ensure that violence does not derail either the talks or the transition.

In these circumstances the demand by the MDC that all violence should stop, that political detainees should be released and that is NGOs be allowed to distribute food are reasonable. However I would qualify these demands by recognising that even if ZANU PF gives undertakings it will be difficult to verify the compliance of those undertakings in the short term and to change the mind set of a generation of youth militia overnight. I believe that SADC has a key role to play in this regard. I think the State should immediately deploy civilian monitors to report back to the facilitators regarding whether militia camps have been removed, whether NGOs are able to function and other legitimate issues of concern have been addressed. I think that if such a commitment is given by SADC then negotiations should commence without further ado. But we must recognise that unless there are neutral SADC monitors deployed in the country eruptions of violence are more likely to occur and these may have the effect of disrupting the talks.

It follows as well that a crucial aspect of the talks must be how to tackle the culture of violence so that it does not derail any transitional period agreed to in the talks. Time does not permit me to go into what is needed in this regard. Suffice it to say that we must not underestimate how serious this problem is and our need for an ongoing presence of SADC monitors even during the transitional period. In short even after the talks have ended the world must not pass us by – we will need an ongoing international help and commitment, especially from our SADC brothers and sisters, to stabilise our beloved country.

The way ahead

No GNU

For the reasons I have outlined above a government of national unity will be viewed with extreme scepticism by most Zimbabweans. The fear of Zimbabweans is that the government of national unity will draw in unscrupulous political leaders who then become part of a corrupt system. The fear is that those leaders are then compromised and that they will fail to deal with the fundamental problems facing Zimbabwe.

Transitional authority

It is for this reason that a transitional authority should be agreed to and I would like to discuss a few aspects of this authority. Before I do so let me respond to those who may say that there is no difference between a GNU and a Transitional Authority. Some argue that this is just about semantics. I disagree – the difference is all about emphasis. A GNU focuses on “unity”; substance is secondary and the notion of a transition to something different is completely subordinate to unity. A Transitional Authority focuses on “transition”. There can, and must of course, be unity in transition but the emphasis is on a transition to something new, not just a changing of the guard at the top.

1. Composition

In the same statement issued by civil society organisations yesterday they said that the transitional authority should be neutral and should include all representatives of civil society groups including churches. That sounds fine in theory that a major problem faces us all in agreeing who is neutral. In addition agreement would have to be reached within civil society as to who from civil society should be included in any such transitional authority. One needs to ask the question “what is a person’s mandate”. How will agreement reached regarding who should represent civil society, especially bearing in mind the urgency of the crisis? Bearing in mind that the civic organisations which have made this call are generally aligned to the MDC there must be a danger that if inclusion is insisted upon that “civic organisations” aligned to ZANU PF, such as the War Veterans Association and others, will make similar demands. In short whilst one understands the need for inclusion there are practical problems which should not be allowed to derail or hinder the process at this juncture.

My own belief is that any transitional authority emerging from the talks should generally respect the will of the people as expressed on the 29th of March 2008. As stated above because our nation is so deeply polarised there will have to be a power-sharing arrangement during the transition including all the political parties given a mandate by the electorate in March. However during the transition civil society will have to play a major role in certain aspects of the transitional authority’s mandate, especially regarding the process which should culminate in a new democratic constitution.

2. Duration

Any transitional authority agreed to should have a finite mandate. It must be made clear that the authority will not have a mandate to govern indefinitely. In addition the duration of the authority should be as short as possible; and it should be understood that it is to govern in the short term – I would hope for no longer than 18 months to two years.

3. Mandate

It seems to me that there are four critical areas that need to be addressed by a transitional authority.

A. The economic crisis

The transitional authority should be mandated to stabilise the economy, to seek balance of payments support, to tackle inflation by engaging institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. It will need to draw on technical expertise from qualified Zimbabweans and others who can introduce the necessary economic policies to stop Zimbabwe’s economic freefall.

B. The humanitarian crisis

Zimbabwe is arguably suffering the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis at present. The country faces a severe food shortage; our hospitals are devoid of qualified personnel and medication. An absolute priority of the transitional authority should be to engage the international community to ensure the importation of the necessary food and drugs and introduction of policies which will attract qualified personnel to return to Zimbabwe to address the food and health crisis.

C. The Constitutional crisis

At the root of the political, economic and humanitarian crises is our deeply flawed Constitution. The transitional authority should immediately engage all Zimbabwean political parties, civic organisations that trade union movements, churches and other interested organisations to recommence the constitutional debate and to agree on an all-inclusive process which will culminate in a new constitution.

D. Fresh elections

Once the economy has been stabilised, the humanitarian crisis addressed and a new constitution enacted the transitional authority should hand over to a genuinely, and objectively verifiable, Independent Electoral Commission which will then conduct and genuinely free and fair elections supervised by SADC and the AU.

Unique opportunity

Zimbabwe has reached a political stalemate. There is no way out for ZANU PF. Its nemesis is now the economy. It has no solution to hyperinflation. It knows that in the coming weeks and months it will not even be able to feed key elements of its support base. To that extent it has no choice but to negotiate. Likewise the combined MDC in respecting its moral and practical commitment to a non violent solution to the Zimbabwean crisis must recognise that it to too has no choice but to negotiate, no matter how unpalatable that may be in certain respects.

Despite our fears and reservations we must see this as a unique opportunity to negotiate a peaceful settlement for our nation. Our country is in great peril today. We can either allow it to continue down its present slide to destruction and oblivion or we can all work together to seize this opportunity to lay the foundations for a great nation. I reiterate again the words of Garfield Todd made over 50 years ago – this is indeed the finest country on earth. It is missing one key ingredient at present – democracy. When that ingredient is rooted I have no doubt that the Zimbabwe will yet become the jewel of Africa.

Senator David Coltart
Khumalo Constituency
Bulawayo
18th July 2008

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Brown bids to toughen European sanctions on Zimbabwean regime

The Independent
By Daniel Howden, Deputy Foreign Editor
Monday, 14 July 2008

Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sought to toughen European Union sanctions against the Mugabe regime yesterday after a bruising diplomatic failure in New York, where China and Russia vetoed action on the Zimbabwe crisis from the UN Security Council.
Britain will submit 36 additional names to the list of people already targeted by EU sanctions because of their links to the junta in Harare, said Mr Brown after holding talks with European leaders in Paris.

“We should not lessen the pressure on this regime,” the Prime Minister said. “I believe we need to make a transition to democracy as soon as possible.”

The 25-nation bloc has already imposed travel and financial sanctions on 131 individuals connected to Mugabe’s regime, under measures drafted in 2002. The US has similar sanctions in place.

Fresh from his UN triumph, Mr Mugabe signalled his intent to travel to New York exploiting a diplomatic loophole which allows him to attend UN gatherings as a head of state. Asked if his boss would be travelling to the annual general assembly meeting in September, Zimbabwe’s UN ambassador, Boniface Chidyausiku, said: “Yes, definitely he will come.”

The 84-year-old has proved adept at side-stepping the measures of his Western critics designed to isolate him, and has rejoiced in opportunities to confront his opponents on the international stage. The failure of the US-UK bid for UN sanctions was greeted with glee by the government in Harare and relief by South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who has been defending the regime from international pressure.

The UN resolution would have imposed an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and clamped a worldwide asset freeze and travel ban on Mr Mugabe and 13 of his inner circle accused of orchestrating the campaign of political terror in the run-up to the 27 June run-off election. The outline of the measures was backed unanimously by the leaders at the G8 group of rich nations in Japan last week, but Russia shifted its position within 48 hours of signing the statement.

The package of measures also called on the UN to name a special representative to act as a mediator in Zimbabwe, and hopes remain that this will still go ahead. The former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who played a similar role in mediating a resolution to the crisis in Kenya, has made clear his availability to fulfil this task.

South Africa’s Mr Mbeki strongly opposes such a move, as it would undermine his role as the regionally appointed mediator.
Concerns were mounting that the failed sanctions bid would harden Mr Mugabe’s stance of in talks with the opposition, as he now faces an international community clearly divided on how to move against him.

Mr Brown said it was “very important” that talks “lead to a legitimate outcome”. Should they fail, he said, there is a case to go back to the United Nations.

The crisis in Zimbabwe remains Mr Mugabe’s main problem as hyperinflation has pushed the Zimbabwean dollar to 350 billion to the pound and the economy has totally collapsed.

“The defeat of the UN resolution is a pyrrhic victory for Mugabe,” said opposition Senator David Coltart. “The ball is now firmly in Mbeki’s court to deal with this crisis, because he was the one that argued most effectively against the UN resolution and he must now deliver before the situation deteriorates further.

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Lament for democracy in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe

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.

Some analysts say that if Mugabe’s record holds, the wily 84-year-old president may throw a bone to the opposition, perhaps by offering to share power or recognizing its gains in Parliament, as he has done in previous rigged elections. Then he’ll quietly renege.

Fear and loathing

Whether such old tactics can work today, in the face of growing international outrage at Mugabe’s brutality, remains to be seen.

“I think he’ll try and hold on for a year, then handpick a successor inside ZANU-PF,” said David Coltart, an opposition senator, using the acronym for Mugabe’s ruling party. “He’ll pretty much do anything to keep real power out of the hands of Morgan [Tsvangirai], whom he loathes.”

Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who withdrew from Friday’s runoff after thousands of his followers were beaten and hundreds of thousands more were driven from their homes, appears to be counting solely on foreign intervention to force a political dialogue. In an Election Day message to his demoralized supporters, most of whom sat out the voting, he was reduced to biblical exhortations: “Be not afraid, the Lord is with you.”

“I don’t know what we made our sacrifices for,” said a bitter MDC activist, speaking by telephone from Zimbabwe’s rural Masvingo province, where Tsvangirai’s campaigners have been shot, burned and beaten to death. “It’s all over here. Zimbabwe’s finished.”

He choked back tears of fury. Agents from the Central Intelligence Organization, Mugabe’s feared secret police, were outside his business office, he said, stripping the inventory from his farm supply store in retaliation for his opposition sympathies.
Unfortunately for 12 million Zimbabweans — citizens of one of the prettiest nations in Africa, a place once known more for its safari lodges and thundering waterfalls than for corpses abandoned at roadsides — there is more than political terror to survive in the days ahead.

With erratic rains this year expected to shrink crop harvests by at least a third, humanitarian experts warn that the fertile country, which once fed the rest of the continent, faces mass starvation.

“As of August, we’ll have a major food crisis,” said Clever Maputseni, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian affairs office in Harare, the capital. “This country has a crop deficit of millions of metric tons of grain. Where are we going to get that food on short notice?”

Maputseni noted that 2 million to 4 million Zimbabweans depend on UN food aid, according to the seasons. More than 200,000 are HIV-positive, requiring supplemental food packets just to stay alive.

But no food is being distributed. Mugabe banned all foreign humanitarian operations in Zimbabwe two weeks ago, after accusing aid groups of meddling in politics.
Asking not to be named for fear of government retaliation, one aid worker in Harare said the ban would likely last for weeks, in order to prevent outsiders from witnessing an expected new wave of revenge attacks on communities that sat out Friday’s elections.

In the end, many experts believe it will be hunger and economic devastation that bring a defiant Mugabe to the negotiating table—not pressure from the West, the UN, or the African Union.

Zimbabwe’s shelves are bare. With inflation now orbiting almost meaninglessly at over 2 million percent, the country has become a surreal land of 16-billion-Zimbabwe-dollar chicken legs. Whole chickens aren’t available. And Mugabe exhausted his meager treasury by handing out a last few mini-buses and farming tools to sway his cowed and slat-ribbed electorate.

Staggering on

The United States has promised to lobby for yet more sanctions against Zimbabwe in the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday. How this will affect a country that cannot even issue passports to those who want to flee—there isn’t any paper to print them on—is debatable.

“I guess that’s one way of being positive,” joked Marco Ndlovu, an orphanage manager in Zimbabwe’s second-largest city of Bulawayo. “Things cannot stay this way. And they cannot possibly get worse. They absolutely cannot. So something must change.”

Ndlovu’s orphanage was shut down two weeks ago by a gang of ZANU-PF toughs, even though it was government funded. The militants targeted him, he said, for being a social worker. More than 230 children at his orphanage have lost their means of support, he said.

And so, only the skeleton of Zimbabwe staggers on.

Five new names were added to the casualty roster Saturday. All were beaten to death.

The toll will likely grow, human-rights experts fear, as Mugabe attempts to consolidate his power and as political vendettas are settled in the weeks ahead. Further violence is expected to burn hottest in the country’s east — once a bastion of government support — that did not line up loyally behind Mugabe in March’s first-round election.

“Our people are our hope,” said Coltart, the opposition lawmaker. “There are no braver, or more patient, or finer people than Zimbabweans.”

Such statements may sound pat coming from most politicians.

Yet they are frequently borne out in Zimbabwe, where empty-bellied bystanders—unemployed men, weary grandmothers and underweight children—have been known to start dancing on the dusty roadside when a passing car radio pumps out African music.

There is no recourse in hapless Zimbabwe. So its people dance.

psalopek@tribune.com

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Voters in main cities defy reprisal threats to avoid ‘sham’ presidential poll

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.”

Mr Tsvangirai said that militias were forcing rural voters to record the serial numbers of their ballots in order to identify those who voted for his party.

MDC leaders and civil groups say security forces hope a high turnout will provide legitimacy for a run-off condemned by many, including the European Commission, as a “sham”.

The MDC fears that anyone whose hands do not carry the ink used for marking ballots will be targeted in “Operation Red Finger”.
Mr Tsvangirai – who says he withdrew to spare supporters’ lives – remains on the ballot because the electoral authorities ruled his withdrawal came too late.

“If possible, we ask you not to vote today,” he wrote in a final pre-election e-mail to supporters, from his refuge at the Dutch embassy in Harare. “But if you must vote for Mr Mugabe because of threats on your life today, then do so.”

The opposition says at least 86 of its supporters have been killed and 200,000 people displaced in state-sponsored electoral violence.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Leak reveals ruthless strategy to bomb and murder until election

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.

The terror campaign in Zimbabwe is already estimated to have claimed up to 500 lives and is being described as a “politicide” – a deliberate and systematic attempt to wipe out an entire political class. “This is the deliberate targeting of people in political structures, going to the extent of killing them,” said the opposition Senator and human rights lawyer, David Coltart. “This is systematic and widespread with an intent that goes beyond the election – to permanently cripple the MDC.”

With the military in effective control of the country, armed militia have been let loose on the civilian population. With army support, gangs of ruling party thugs sweep through villages at night, killing, torturing and raping MDC supporters. Murder and torture victims have routinely had their ears, lips and sexual organs cut off, doctors report.

The conditions in the country have prompted the international monitors, Genocide Watch, to give the country a “Stage 6” listing – the final preparation stage ahead of political mass murder. Zanu-PF militia attacked the rural home of a MDC official, Elias Mudzuri , on Tuesday night, razing the village to the ground. The former mayor of Harare’s 80-year-old father was badly injured in the attack and two other relatives were shot and wounded.

Elsewhere, in Chiredzi in the south-east of the country, four farm workers were executed by a death squad. News of the murders, which occurred last week, only emerged yesterday after a fifth man who survived was able to describe the attack to his brother. Six men were apparently forced to lay face down on the ground before being shot twice, once in the head. The witness only survived after pretending to be dead when the bullet passed into the ground through his cheek.

The ruling party’s monopoly of state media has left the opposition struggling to get word of the boycott of tomorrow’s vote to supporters. In the opposition stronghold of Bulawayo yesterday, MDC posters still called on voters to make a final effort tomorrow. The terror campaign has displaced the economic crisis from the headlines but food queues throughout Zimbabwe’s second city served as a reminder of the daily hardships faced by ordinary people.

At one store selling mealie-meal for porridge, shoppers stood in line for hours while ruling party supporters were freely given sacks of maize. One man who confronted a local Zanu party member organising the giveaway said: “I told them this is not right you cannot do this, there are people waiting.” What followed was a brief lesson in the political realities of a country where starvation is being used as a tool to enforce party loyalty. “After I made a noise, she told me that they would save a sack for me. I said: ‘What about the others?’ And she told me: ‘No just for you.'”

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The Reign of Thuggery

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.

And yet, when Mbeki stepped off the plane on May 9, it appeared to be business as usual—smiles, embraces, and hand-in-hand stroll across the tarmac. At their State House meeting, according to those close to the proceedings, Mbeki gently prodded Mugabe to declare an early date for the runoff. Then he suggested, diplomatically, that Mugabe should find a way to end the violence. It didn’t matter who had instigated it, Mbeki said. Mugabe controlled the police and the army, and they could stop it.
Mugabe told Mbeki that the situation was under control, and that Zimbabwe’s own laws would deal with it. The tone of the meeting was “chilly,” I was told by one close observer; but Mbeki made no demands, and left without receiving any commitments. Since then, Mbeki has kept his distance from Mugabe. “It appears that he’s washed his hands of the whole thing,” the source said.

Mbeki’s inaction is hardly surprising. Since Mugabe initiated his catastrophic “land grab” in January 2000, turning over four thousand white-owned farms to putative veterans of Zimbabwe’s independence war and to cronies, the South African president has failed to address forthrightly both Zimbabwe’s subsequent economic collapse and Mugabe’s many human rights abuses. Clinging to an ineffectual policy of “quiet diplomacy,” Mbeki stood by as Mugabe accelerated his violent land reform program. He then said and did little as the dictator unleashed thugs to intimidate voters and stuffed ballot boxes to guarantee electoral victories for Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.

Mbeki has given the dictator and his inner circle political and diplomatic support in many forums, including the United Nations, even as the rest of Zimbabwe’s population suffers the consequences of economic collapse. Over the past eight years, agricultural production in Zimbabwe has fallen by four fifths, unemployment has risen to 85 percent, inflation has risen to an annual rate of more than one million percent, and three million Zimbabweans have fled the country. (The current population is estimated to be 12 million.) Most, ironically, have gone to South Africa, feeding the xenophobia that climaxed on May 19 in an explosion of violence. Since then dozens of people have been killed and more than 25,000 displaced.

After a week of silence on that issue, Mbeki on May 26 denounced the xenophobic attacks as an “absolute disgrace.” By then, however, his stature inside South Africa had sunk to a new low: party elders sharply criticized him for being out of touch, and the Sunday Times, a leading Johannesburg newspaper, called for his resignation in a front page editorial. “Mbeki has demonstrated that he no longer has the heart to lead,” the Times said.

Theories abound about what may bind Mbeki to Mugabe: a reverence for the Zimbabwean dictator as the last living founder of the African liberation movement; personal distaste for Tsvangirai; a reflexive suspicion of the MDC as an agent of Western governments; fear that an MDC victory could embolden the opposition in South Africa and undermine the ANC. (“Mbeki is a ‘scion’ of liberation movements. There is no way he can dump President Mugabe at this critical moment,” said Campion Mereki in an opinion piece published in Zimbabwe’s Herald newspaper, the ruling party’s mouthpiece.) Whatever the case, Mbeki’s seeming blindness toward widespread intimidation of MDC voters, displacements of thousands of people, and the terrorizing of teachers, election observers, and party activists has undoubtedly worsened an already desperate situation. It is now “next to impossible,” according to one top-ranking MDC official I spoke to, that the second-round election can be carried out in a free and fair manner.
If Mugabe wins the election on June 27, his victory will represent, in part, the last, desperate gambit of a regime that long ago lost any shred of legitimacy. But it will also demonstrate how the possibility of genuine electoral change turned into a continuing nightmare—a nightmare of open, repressive brutality—thanks, in large part, to the refusal of Mbeki and other African leaders to intervene (with the exception of Ian Khama of Botswana, who has provided quiet support for Tsvangirai). This abdication of responsibility bears consequences not only for the future of Zimbabwe under the apparently unhindered violent rule of Mugabe, but also for the possibility of some minimal kind of multinational African concern for protecting democratic processes and human rights.

2.

The current crisis in Zimbabwe was set in motion last fall, when Mugabe, who commanded guerrilla forces in a six-year independence war against the white-minority regime of Ian Smith, and who has ruled the country since independence in 1980, announced that he would run again for his country’s presidency. Until that time, it was widely assumed that Mugabe, who is eighty-four, would retire to a $15 million villa in the northern suburbs of Harare in mid-2008, and pass on power to one of several possible heirs in waiting, including Vice President Joyce Mujuru, a former independence war hero known as “Comrade Spillblood.” His candidacy was ratified at an extraordinary party congress in December 2007, despite subdued protests by senior party officials who, according to news reports, called the vote a “fraudulent process” marred by “blatant intrigue and manipulation.”
At the time, Mugabe’s reelection seemed all but assured. It was widely assumed that the ZANU-PF would resort to the same tactics—voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, and falsified tabulations of the final vote count by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission—that it has used in three previous elections this decade against the Movement for Democratic Change, led by Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist. Tsvangirai said the MDC was a “liberal” party, committed to restoring civil rights and ending corruption.

As the election neared, Mugabe’s prospects for victory began to dim. In February 2008, Simba Makoni, a British-educated economist and secretary for economic affairs of the ZANU-PF, announced that he was making an independent run for the presidency. He accused the ZANU-PF of failing to deal with the country’s deepening poverty, and of fueling hyperinflation through the uncontrolled printing of Zimbabwean dollars. Makoni was then expelled from the ruling party and denounced as a traitor, but his breakaway candidacy was the first evidence of disaffection at the top of the ZANU-PF.

At about the same time, the MDC, which had been weakened by a split along tribal lines in October 2005, began showing renewed vitality. On March 11, 2007, Tsvangirai had been grabbed by police and savagely beaten with truncheons and iron bars; he suffered a concussion and several fractures. “His left arm was shattered, he had seven stitches across his skull, his entire body was black and blue,” one of his advisers, a former British army officer, told me. “The combination of the beating, and the physical and moral courage he showed, won him the sympathy of the nation.”

Thus there was a sense of possibility in the air when I arrived in Zimbabwe three days before the March 29 election. As on three prior visits, I came in on a tourist visa: the government had banned almost all Western journalists from entering Zimbabwe to cover the elections. On the way to downtown Harare, I passed a mile-long row of campaign posters for Mugabe: unsmiling visage, eyes hard behind thick frames, fist raised, the slogan proclaiming “Our Nation. Our Sovereignty”—a reference to the ruling party’s now- shopworn argument that the Movement for Democratic Change was a puppet of Great Britain and the United States, and sought to roll back Zimbabwe to the days of white-minority rule. Every one of these posters, I saw, had been defaced by a splatter of black paint. (The Herald that week announced a citywide manhunt for those who did it.) I checked into the York Lodge, a colonial-style guest house tucked into the outskirts of town, which was filled with both Western correspondents and staff members of the National Democratic Institute, a US pro-democracy organization that was quietly training independent election monitors ahead of the vote.

I attended Tsvangirai’s last rally, in Chitungwiza, a dozen miles south of Harare, before 15,000 MDC supporters at the city’s football stadium. Stylishly attired in a tan panama hat and a white Cuban guayabera covered with a green palm tree motif, Tsvangirai, who is fifty-six, addressed the excited throng in Shona, the main tribal language of Zimbabwe, punctuating his speech with riffs in English. He led the crowd in Shona victory chants and traditional Zimbabwean songs; at the end of his thirty-minute talk, he danced a celebratory two-step across the podium, bobbing, weaving, and spinning as the crowd roared. Tsvangirai is a charismatic campaigner and the mood of the crowd was jubilant.

One man I interviewed, Patrick Nyengera, had just returned from his birthplace, Gokwe, in rural Midlands province, and had been astonished by the disenchantment shown for the dictator there. Rural areas in the north, central, and eastern regions of Zimbabwe had long voted overwhelmingly for Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, which controlled the distribution of food as well as information, and terrorized opposition supporters during past electoral campaigns. But “now it’s gone over to the MDC,” he told me. “Mugabe made so many promises and none of those were kept—there is no dip for the cattle, no food, the shops are empty, they are closed. There’s nothing to buy. Support for him is just dropping away. There are some Mugabe supporters out there, but just a few.”

Early on the morning of election day, March 29, I met Tsvangirai at his house in Avondale, a leafy suburb a few miles north of Harare’s city center. Tsvangirai, dressed now in a peach-colored guayabera, led me to a picnic table beside the swimming pool in his rear garden, and we sat beneath the shade of a gum tree. He was calm and confident, pledging to create “a government of national unity” as soon as he was elected, assuring me that top ZANU-PF officials and military commanders would be pensioned off and would not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Mugabe era. “That reassurance is very important, because there are people in the military and in the ZANU-PF, with all their ill-gotten wealth, who feel very insecure.” Tsvangirai told me that he would extend forgiveness even to Mugabe, who would be allowed to retire to his Harare villa, there to finish out his days as “a failed founding father of Zimbabwe.”

I asked Tsvangirai if, should Mugabe steal the election, he would consider it a personal failure. He shook his head emphatically. “I feel proud that we’ve managed to build a movement that has confronted this dictatorship relentlessly in spite of the resources they have poured against us,” he told me. But he did not want to dwell on the possibility of failure. “You see people in a [police or military] uniform now, and it’s just a uniform,” Tsvangirai told me. “All of a sudden people are so confident, so happy about this victory. In people’s hearts, they know that this regime has to go.”

As it turned out, the MDC had one powerful, and often overlooked, weapon in its effort to unseat the dictator. Before the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the fourteen-member group of countries in the region, had wrested from the state-controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission a key concession: vote counts would be posted outside every polling station in the country, guaranteeing an unprecedented transparency in the electoral process. During the voting in 2005, however, the government had reneged on that agreement, often locking opposition polling agents and monitors inside the polling stations to prevent them from reporting the results.

But in the runup to this year’s elections, renewed pressure by SADC leaders, including Mbeki, forced the government to promise to comply with the guidelines. (The ZANU-PF was confident that it maintained enough control over rural Zimbabwe to win even in a transparent vote.) This was, in fact, one of a handful of instances in which Mbeki has tried to check some of the dictator’s worst abuses. He also urged Mugabe—without any visible effect—to modify both the 2002 Public Order and Security Act and the 2002 Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, draconian pieces of legislation that stifled almost all public criticism of Mugabe. In the weeks before the election, the Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network (ZESN), an independent monitoring group, mobilized eight thousand poll observers at nearly every polling station in Zimbabwe, and the MDC deployed thousands of its own loyalists, most armed with Kodak disposable cameras and cell phones.

The first signs of an electoral calamity for the ruling party came just hours after the polls closed. Late that evening, I drove past the headquarters of the ZANU-PF, a twelve-story tower on the edge of downtown Harare. There were a few lights on in the windows, but no other sign of life: “If the regime had won, you’d see celebrations going on here,” a local Zimbabwean journalist I was riding with told me. The following morning, MDC poll observers reported that half a dozen members of Mugabe’s Politburo, including the widely despised justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, had lost their parliamentary seats; the ruling party remained silent. Hours later, the ZESN was privately telling Western diplomats that Tsvangirai had won a decisive victory, possibly with as much as 55 percent of the total. (MDC leaders forecast a 58 percent victory early on, but those projections were based on a largely urban sampling, and thus proved to be inaccurate.)

The ZANU-PF, meanwhile, appeared to be stalling for time, desperately trying to avoid revealing the extent of the debacle in the making. (According to one report, the ZEC’s first, secret prediction to the ZANU-PF Politburo mirrored that of the MDC: Mugabe would win 27 percent to Tsvangirai’s 58 percent, with Makoni getting 15 percent.) After two days of silence, announcers on state-run television began appearing on air every few hours to read off the winners of parliamentary seats, three or four constituencies at a time; then the station returned to a surreal mix of US sitcoms, Japanese calligraphy shows, Chinese kung fu movies, even a 1970s documentary about the science of monkey behavior. The staff at my hotel sensed the regime’s panic and were quietly ecstatic: “We’re finally going to be rid of the old man,” one of them exulted. “At last we’ll have salt, sugar, milk back on the shelves.”

Perhaps the most telling indication that Mugabe’s grip was loosening, that the ruling party was in disarray, was the scene at the Meikles Hotel, one of the last bastions of luxury in the dilapidated capital. During my previous clandestine visits to Zimbabwe, the Meikles was a no-go zone, a favored haunt of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), Mugabe’s ubiquitous domestic spying agency. But now dozens of unaccredited Western journalists flocked here to attend daily MDC press conferences: despite initial anxieties about a roundup of reporters, it soon became clear that the CIO had little interest in such matters, at least for the moment. “The fear factor has eroded,” I was told by John Makumbe, a respected University of Zimbabwe political analyst and an MDC supporter. He was, for the first time, meeting openly at the hotel with pro-democracy activists, human rights workers, and foreign correspondents. “The CIO are still around, of course, but they are discouraged, disenchanted. They have lost the will to fight.”

There were reports that members of Mugabe’s Joint Operations Command were urging the dictator to give up the fight, and that MDC leaders were involved in final negotiations with army leaders to guarantee them immunity from prosecution. On the evening of April 2, as I sat at the Meikles cappuccino bar with dozens of other reporters and activists, waiting for an MDC press conference to begin, CNN reported that Mugabe would step down that night: the Times of London correspondent displayed a text message from her desk in London: ZANU-PF SOURCES SAY MUGABE WILL GIVE UP POWER. Tendai Biti, the MDC secretary-general, told me that reports of an imminent deal were erroneous, but “there are people in Mugabe’s court who have young children, debts, school fees, who are saying, ‘Chef, you must go.'”

Mugabe himself, Biti believed, was losing the ferocious will that had sustained him through thirty years in power. “The courtiers are propping him up, but he is tired.” A few minutes later, in the ballroom, Morgan Tsvangirai appeared in public for the first time since election day to call the result “a vote for change and a new beginning…a vote for decency, tolerance, equality. We have no doubt we’ve won this election.”

But it is one of the hallmarks of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe that periods of relative calm and normality can be suddenly, even viciously upended. For days, the opposition—and the press—had been lulled into a sense of security. Mugabe’s secret police were still on the payroll, but it was as if they had received orders not to intervene in the democratic process, but had been ordered, perhaps, simply to observe. Then, as has happened so often in the past, the atmosphere palpably changed. I flew out of Zimbabwe, via the southern city of Bulawayo, on April 3, after it became clear that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, clearly under pressure from the ZANU-PF, was determined to drag out the vote counting for weeks. As I waited at Bulawayo’s tiny terminal for a flight to Johannesburg, I was approached by an old friend, David Coltart, an opposition leader and one of two white members of Zimbabwe’s Parliament, who whispered a warning that it was premature to drop my guard. “This place is crawling with CIO agents,” he said. Coltart, who was on his way to deliver a lecture at Oxford University, added: “You can’t feel entirely safe until you’re on the plane—in the air.”

That same afternoon, Mugabe reasserted control and the crackdown on the opposition began. Police raided Harvest House, the MDC’s dilapidated headquarters in downtown Harare, as well as MDC suites at the Meikles, seizing documents, and arresting and beating up opposition members. At the same time, dozens of riot police and CIO agents surrounded the York Lodge, which I had checked out of only the day before. Two correspondents, The New York Times’s Barry Bearak and the Sunday Telegraph contributor Stephen Bevan, with whom I had shared a car for the past week, were arrested on charges of “committing journalism,” interrogated, and imprisoned for four days. Tsvangirai, who had emerged from his safe house on April 2 to all but proclaim an MDC victory, was gone again. And hundreds of so-called War Veterans were mobilized by Mugabe and came out in full force in the streets of several cities.

Since then, the ruling party’s tactics have taken an increasingly vicious turn. According to the Movement for Democratic Change, forty-three supporters have been murdered and hundreds injured in the past six weeks. Thousands have been forced to flee their homes in a drive reminiscent of Operation Murambatsvina, Mugabe’s 2005 “slum clearance” campaign that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 people, almost all of them MDC supporters. A report by the US State Department Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor stated:

Soldiers, police, war veterans and youth militia loyal to the ruling party have been deployed in rural areas throughout Zimbabwe to systematically intimidate voters through killings, beatings, looting of property, burning of homes and public humiliation.
On the evening of May 5, ruling-party thugs descended on three villages in Mashonaland Central province, a former Mugabe stronghold that had turned decisively against the dictator on March 29. Repeating a pattern that has been seen throughout rural Zimbabwe, villagers were summoned to a “reeducation meeting,” where they were forced to denounce the MDC and pledge their allegiance to the ZANU-PF. Then names were called, and those singled out were hustled into the darkness. “Next we heard the whips and screams,” a witness named Bernard Pungwe said, describing a night-long rampage that left six MDC supporters dead and dozens injured. “Every time someone screamed hard the chairman of the meeting would stop his lecture and say: ‘Listen to the traitors, they are dying.'”

Particularly distressing to Zimbabweans have been reports that 2,700 teachers have fled or were evicted, while dozens of schools have been closed down and 121 are being used as bases for the ruling party’s youth militias. One of Mugabe’s achievements was opening up schools to poor blacks. Literacy rates rose from 2 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in recent years. Now Mugabe has been destroying the country’s education system.

Throughout this period, the Southern African Development Community has remained largely disengaged. This pattern was established in the days leading up to the election, when the SADC’s chief of mission—the only monitors whom Mugabe had allowed into the country—blandly praised the regime for preparing the way for a “free and fair” election, despite ample evidence to the contrary. (MDC campaigners, for example, were denied access to state-owned television and radio and to the official electoral register, which was packed with dead and fictitious voters.) SADC leaders met in Lusaka, Zambia, in April to discuss the deepening crisis, but broke up without making a public comment.

The most glaring silence came from Mbeki, who, as the leader of the region’s primary economic and military power, rejected requests from the MDC to intervene on behalf of a free election. “There’s a lot that Mbeki could have done that was not done, and [as a result he] caused a lot of damage,” I was told by George Sibotshiwe, Tsvangirai’s spokesperson and close aide. “All we have seen publicly is Mbeki holding hands with Mugabe, and making trips to Harare to meet with ZANU-PF.”

Not every SADC leader has followed Mbeki’s lead: Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, has been quietly providing Tsvangirai with government planes and other logistical support as the MDC leader travels around Africa, attempting to increase pressure on Mugabe. (The Herald commented that Tsvangirai’s MDC was criss-crossing southern African capitals, “all in a bid to slough off its white western skin for an African one.”) And Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa, the current chairman of the SADC, has been vilified as a neocolonialist by ZANU-PF officials for his outspoken criticism of Mugabe.

Indeed, as Zimbabwe’s drama has played out, there has been a growing split among the southern African nations between the majority, made up of anticolonial national liberation leaders such as Mbeki, and a handful of heads of state who are more pro-Western. Besides Mbeki, other leaders who have refused to condemn Mugabe include Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos, Namibian president Hifikepunye Pohamba, and Mozambican President Armando Guebuza.

This split within the SADC was perhaps most glaring during the notorious “Ship of Shame” incident that unfolded while I was traveling through the region in April. During my stay in Namibia, local newspapers published extensive reports on the odyssey of the An Yue Jiang, a Chinese merchant vessel that was carrying thousands of tons of arms and ammunition to the Zimbabwean government—some of it, presumably, to be used by the army and police to put down opposition protests. After dockworkers in the South African port of Durban refused to unload the vessel, the An Yue Jiang attempted to drop its cargo at the Namibian port of Walvis Bay. But Namibian civil leaders and union pressure obliged the government—normally friendly to Mugabe—to deny the ship landing rights, and it was forced back out to sea.

After a several-week odyssey, however, ZANU-PF officials boasted that they had finally taken delivery of the cargo. The An Yue Jang reportedly unloaded the weapons in May in the Angolan port of Lobito. From there, the cargo traveled by train to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it was loaded onto regular military supply flights and flown to Harare. It was yet another example of how a lack of SADC solidarity in the face of Mugabe’s abuses had emboldened and strengthened one of the world’s most abusive regimes.

At this writing, there seems little question that, without coordinated action by African leaders in neighboring countries, the chances of a fair second-round election are virtually nil. The Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network has been crippled by police raids and intimidation of its volunteers, and won’t be able to deploy many observers at Zimbabwe’s nine thousand polling stations. The New York Times reported that the regime has terrorized thousands of teachers, many of whom served as poll monitors and sided with the opposition during the first round. “The teachers are terrified,” I was told by one Zimbabwean journalist. “They helped to run these polling stations, and many had their houses burned down as a result.” The army and police are expected to be deployed in far greater numbers than in March. And despite expressions of defiance, the huge displacements of population will make it difficult for the MDC to get out the vote. “People we’ve met in the hospitals have told us, ‘we’re not going to vote for people who beat us,'” I was told by a Zimbabwean journalist. “But the rural communities have been disrupted, and people may not be able to get to their polling stations.”

George Sibotshiwe, Tsvangirai’s spokesperson, told me that the MDC was engaged in talks with the SADC, asking for the deployment of thousands of “unarmed peacekeepers” throughout the country. The African Union has also been consulted. “SADC has said that this election must be held under the security of the law,” Sibotshiwe told me. The question, he added, was whether they will back up their words with active election monitors. The performance of the SADC up to this point suggests that they will not.

On May 16 I caught up with Tsvangirai again at the Hotel Europa in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he was to speak at an international conference of liberal party leaders, his final public appearance before flying back to Zimbabwe to carry on his campaign. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Hotel Europa had been called “the most bombed hotel in Europe”—a favorite target of the Irish Republican Army. Today, refurbished and frequently filled to capacity, it’s become one of the most potent symbols of Northern Ireland’s postwar renewal. In his talk Tsvangirai drew parallels between Northern Ireland’s recovery and Zimbabwe’s eventual “new era.” But Zimbabwe, he admitted, still had far to go to reach that point. Tsvangirai spoke of “a wave of brutality reminiscent of the worst days of evil during the Ian Smith Regime.” “No Zimbabwean,” he said, “is safe from the wrath of this vicious dictator.” Leaders in the region—particularly Mbeki—had an obligation “to speak out against Mugabe and his henchmen.”
When I talked to Tsvangirai at the end of his speech, I reminded him of our election-day meeting at his home in Harare. I asked him if he thought his life would be in danger if he went back to Zimbabwe. The regime was capable of anything, he replied, and “I’m as vulnerable as everyone else.” His words, as it turned out, were prescient. The next day, Tsvangirai was forced to postpone his homecoming after MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti said the MDC had uncovered a Zimbabwean army plot to kill Tsvangirai using a team of snipers.

As I write this, Tsvangirai has just returned to Harare, and the violence in Zimbabwe continues. In May, in another example of the widening split among southern African political figures over the Zimbabwe crisis, Pallo Jordan, an outspoken member of Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet, told the ZANU-PF to “surrender power to the party that has won.” Mbeki maintains his silence.

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Zimbabwe’s refugees wait for a saviour

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.

The attacks have been variously labelled as xenophobic, as a symptom of competition for scant resources in a country where at least one in four people are unemployed, or simply as another manifestation of a national violent crime epidemic.

“What emerged was criminality,” Jacob Zuma, leader of the ruling African National Congress, said last week. ”Xenophobia has been used as an excuse to loot.”

Whatever the root cause of the violence come of the Zimbabweans at the church say they have rarely ventured out since the start of the attacks, which have more than doubled the numbers sheltering there. Patrick, a 24-year-old with a distant gaze, recalls witnessing a mother and daughter beaten to death nearby. “It is like living in a prison,” he says.

The choice is stark: return to Zimbabwe and face the consequences of flight and the suspicions it arouses, or eke out a living taking low-profile part-time work in Johannesburg.

All but one of the refugees who speak to the Financial Times say they have found it impossible to obtain proper papers as immigrants.

The Human Rights Watch report calls for South Africa to halt deportations of Zimbabweans and grant them temporary work rights. Siobhan McCarthy, spokeswoman for the home affairs ministry, says the government is working on a new classification for the majority of such arrivals who, she says, are primarily economic migrants fleeing financial collapse. At the same time, the authorities face intense pressure from poor South Africans with scant access to health services and decent housing.

The Zimbabweans counter accusations that they are undercutting South African wages by saying employers who offer them domestic or construction work pay Zimbabwean rates. Even here, it seems, there is no escape from the hyperinflation that has scuppered their homeland’s economy.

There is an irony, too, that the immigrants are locked out of a labour market desperate for skilled workers. “Look at these people from Zimbabwe,” says Martin, 29, a former soldier from central Zimbabwe who was fired from the army for his political views. “They have diplomas, degrees. They need jobs.”

The exiles are not a particularly religious bunch, Mr Charamba says. In recent days their agnosticism has spread to the institutions and leaders they feel have failed them – the South African Development Community and Thabo Mbeki, the South African president leading the regional grouping’s mediation effort in Zimbabwe; the African Union; the United Nations; and now even Mr Tsvangirai, the man only days ago they still hoped might deliver them.

Some accept Mr Tsvangirai’s argument that the toll of more than 80 opposition supporters killed and thousands more tortured and injured would have risen still further had he pushed ahead with Friday’s planned run-off.

Others feel betrayed. “It shows that there is no future,” says Martin, who now forms part of the ad hoc security contingent at the Methodist centre. “Someone from outside Zimbabwe will have to come to the rescue.”

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Tsvangirai officially withdraws but Mugabe to go ahead with run off

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.

Legal expert David Coltart said the opinions drafted by highly competent Senior Counsel, David Unterhalter, Wim Trengove and Max du Plessis, should be taken seriously. But Coltart said the statements assume that we are dealing with a lawful, rational regime that is prepared to take the rule of law seriously and a judiciary that would give serious consideration to the arguments. He said: “Neither is the case and so to that extent the opinions remain academic. There is no doubt that they add further strength to the argument that Mugabe is illegitimate, but ultimately even that issue will be resolved politically not legally.”

But another constitutional law expert, Dr Lovemore Madhuku, said on Monday; ‘The strict legal position is that candidature for the run-off or the second election is not a voluntary exercise, you give your consent when you contest the first election.” He said this is an “irreversible process” and the kind of “charade” which the law in Zimbabwe allows and which does not address the issue of the violence.

In his withdrawal letter to Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Tsvangirai said: “There have been no rules prescribed for the conduct of a presidential run-off election and in particular the notice period set for the withdrawal of candidature by a participant. Accordingly, any candidate wishing to withdraw his candidature is free to do so at any time, before such an election.”

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‘It’s a dire situation’ – Zimbabwe in no-win situation

The Star (Johannesburg)
June 24, 2008
By Peta Thornycroft, Louis Weston and Hans Pienaar

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai sought refuge at the Dutch embassy in Harare as Robert Mugabe’s government said it would press ahead with Friday’s presidential run-off despite Tsvangirai’s withdrawal.

The Movement for Democratic Change leader went to the Dutch embassy, a large compound in the east of the city, after announcing his pullout on Sunday.

“He asked to come and stay because he was concerned about his safety,” a Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in The Hague yesterday.

Tsvangirai had not requested political asylum.

Earlier, the MDC said police raided its Harare headquarters and took away more than 60 victims of violence, including women and children.

The MDC said nearly 90 of its supporters had been killed by militias backing Mugabe since the March 27 elections.

It added that newly elected Thamsanqa Mahlangu, a deputy for a constituency in Bulawayo, “is battling for his life in an intensive care unit after armed Zanu-PF militia attacked him on Sunday”.

Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean government said it was pressing ahead with the election.

“We don’t have a war. We will be able to hold credible elections,” Zimbabwe Electoral Commission chairperson George Chiweshe said.

Zanu-PF spokesperson Patrick Chinamasa told the state-controlled Herald newspaper yesterday: “Zanu-PF is not treating the threats (of world condemnation) seriously; it is a nullity. We are proceeding with our campaign to romp to victory on Friday.”

MDC legal expert David Coltart said in his interpretation of the Electoral Act that it was too late for a formal withdrawal and that the run-off would have to go ahead.

In SA, the Democratic Alliance called for the election to continue, with the MDC on the ballot.

Cancelling the election or removing Tsvangirai from the ballot would complete the process by which Mugabe launched a silent coup d’etat.

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