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Thursday, April 10, 2008 6:17:27 PM
Zimbabwe Opposition Rejects Runoff
A banner for the opposition presidential candidate Morgan
Tsvangirai above a party office in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.
By CELIA W. DUGGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: April 11, 2008
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s main opposition party decided Thursday that its presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, would not take part in a runoff because it determined he had won the disputed election outright, its secretary general said at a news conference here.
After waiting 12 days for an official announcement of the outcome of Zimbabwe’s presidential election — one that independent monitors say Mr. Tsvangirai won, though probably not by enough to avoid a runoff — Tendai Biti, the opposition’s secretary general, accused the governing party led by President Robert Mugabe of carrying out what he called “a constitutional coup d’état.”
The opposition party’s rejection of a runoff is a departure from its earlier stance: It had expressed reluctance about participating a runoff, but stopped short of saying it would not take part in one.
With evidence accumulating that youth militias organized by the ruling party, known as ZANU-PF, are moving through rural areas, beating up opposition supporters and threatening worse if they vote for the opposition in a runoff, Mr. Biti said African leaders must tell Mr. Mugabe to step aside when they gather for an emergency meeting this Saturday in Lusaka, Zambia, to consider the crisis in Zimbabwe.
“This is the endgame of the endgame,” Mr. Biti said. “Checkmate already happened on the 29th of March.”
But the autocratic Mr. Mugabe, who has held power for 28 years, often ruthlessly, is likely to have a few moves left. A spokesman for the government told news agencies in Harare, the capital, that Mr. Mugabe would attend the Lusaka meeting; he has often rallied support among African heads of state in the past with angry denunciations of meddling Western nations,.
Nor has he accepted defeat. His party has demanded a recount of the vote — a vote that has not even been announced yet — and said Thursday in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, that it was now contesting the results in 21 seats in the lower house of Parliament, enough to swing the parliamentary majority back to ZANU-PF.
At the same time, the police have arrested eight election officials on charges of fraud in the counting of votes. The opposition and trade union groups say the arrests appear to be a bald attempt to intimidate the country’s electoral commission to rig the vote in a recount.
The state’s move against the election officials was severe. The Herald reported, for example, that the police arrested a primary-school headmaster, Shadreck Mufute, 47, “on allegations of depriving President Mugabe of 10 votes which he allegedly gave to Morgan Tsvangirai in the presidential race.”
The state opposed giving Mr. Mufute bail. The magistrate granted him bail of $600 million in Zimbabwean currency — only about 14 United Stated dollars on the black market — but required that he report to a police base every Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Herald reported that Mr. Mufute’s lawyers denied the authenticity of the document used as the basis of the charge against him and said he had neither prepared it nor signed it.
Nelson Chamisa, an opposition spokesman, said a decision had not yet been made whether Mr. Tsvangirai would attend the emergency weekend meeting of southern Africa’s heads of state on the political crisis gripping the country. But there were some indications that Mr. Mugabe would. “If there is a S.A.D.C. meeting of heads of state, then obviously he will attend,” Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga said of Mr. Mugabe, The Associated Press reported.
On Wednesday, Mr. Tsvangirai traveled to Botswana as part of his continuing campaign to seek international support to end the crisis and remove Mr. Mugabe. In an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Tsvangirai said Mr. Mugabe was carrying out a “de facto military coup” to keep his grip on power, but would be ousted with the help of other African countries.
“We’ll manage to get Mugabe out,” he said in the interview, according to Time’s Web site. “Mugabe is being deserted. No one wants to touch Mugabe in the region now. Eventually, we will ease him out.”
Jeff Ramsay, a government spokesman in Botswana, said that nation’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, met with Mr. Tsvangirai on Wednesday morning. He said the president would attend the summit.
(Page 2 of 2)
“I am sure he is concerned,” he said of the president’s attitude to the situation in Zimbabwe. “Obviously we hope things will remain peaceful and that Zimbabweans will find common ground.”
With the threat of political violence looming in Zimbabwe, the regional association acted after Zimbabwe’s political opposition complained about “the deafening silence” from its African neighbors and warned that the electoral standoff could turn increasingly violent without international intervention.
Already, the opposition has said, about 200 of its polling agents, campaign workers and other supporters have been arrested, beaten or kidnapped since the March 29 election.
A number of Western governments and leaders have also expressed serious concern that the government had still not released the results of the presidential race, and they have demanded that the election tally be quickly posted.
In calling an emergency meeting of the southern African bloc, Levy Mwanawasa, the Zambian president and the chairman of the group, seemed to answer the opposition’s call for intervention. He said “nothing should be done by anybody that would further give rise to heightened tension in Zimbabwe.”
It was unclear whether Zimbabwe’s neighbors — many of them with political or fraternal bonds to Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old president and liberation hero — could or would do much to defuse one of the most ominous political crises since Zimbabwe waged a regional civil war some 25 years ago.
In recent years, Zimbabwe has descended into economic and social chaos, with 80 percent unemployment, 100,000 percent annual inflation and a hunger emergency affecting four million people. But regional leaders have been loath to express more than mild concern, and have almost never questioned Mr. Mugabe’s leadership.
At a court hearing on Wednesday in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, a lawyer for the government-controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission suggested that a premature release of the results could be dangerous, and that the government might ignore a legal order to make the vote public.
He contended that the electoral commission was still verifying the results of the vote, although the quasi-independent commission long ago released the tallies for parliamentary elections held the same day.
Lawyers for the Movement for Democratic Change, who have asked the court to order the release of the presidential vote, said there was no plausible reason to withhold the collated results of an election whose local outcomes had already been posted, for all to read, on the doors of some 9,000 polling places.
But Mr. Mugabe’s government has accused the opposition’s supporters of trying to rig the outcome. On Wednesday, it announced the arrests of more election officials on charges of falsifying votes against Mr. Mugabe, adding to others already charged. The electoral commission also accepted a governing party request for a recount of votes in five parliamentary constituencies, the justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, told Reuters.
The opposition says the arrests are an attempt to intimidate election officials into awarding Mr. Mugabe a victory in a race that, under any impartial accounting, he has lost.
The opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, said that Mr. Tsvangirai would meet with heads of state in many of Zimbabwe’s neighbors “to get them to appreciate the magnitude of the crisis in Zimbabwe.”
The region, Mr. Tsvangirai told South Africa’s SABC News on Wednesday, “does not need that political chaos and dislocation on their doorstep.”
But South Africa, the one country most likely to hold sway in Zimbabwe’s crisis, took pains on Wednesday to distance itself from the opposition. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had no plans to meet Mr. Tsvangirai, a spokesman for Mr. Mbeki said, although a spokesman for the opposition said Mr. Tsvangirai had requested a meeting.
Separately, South Africa dismissed calls for an international effort to address Zimbabwe’s crisis in the United Nations, saying the political situation there was an internal political matter. South Africa holds the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council this month, a position in which it has added leverage to bring global issues before the body for debate.
Mr. Mbeki, Africa’s favored mediator in Zimbabwe’s political crisis, has sometimes been accused of treating Mr. Mugabe’s harsh rule with kid gloves. Asked Wednesday whether South Africa had again rebuffed Mr. Mugabe’s opponents, Mr. Chamisa replied, “Time will tell.”
Mr. Mugabe’s handling of Zimbabwe’s elections drew a second rebuke on Wednesday from Simba Makoni, a breakaway member of Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party who appears to have captured close to 10 percent of the presidential vote. At a news conference, he argued that the delay in releasing the results only heightened tensions. But Mr. Makoni refused to say whom he might support should Zimbabwe’s presidential vote end in a runoff. The law requires a runoff if no candidate gains more than half the vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/world/africa/11zimbabwe.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
A banner for the opposition presidential candidate Morgan
Tsvangirai above a party office in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.
By CELIA W. DUGGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: April 11, 2008
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s main opposition party decided Thursday that its presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, would not take part in a runoff because it determined he had won the disputed election outright, its secretary general said at a news conference here.
After waiting 12 days for an official announcement of the outcome of Zimbabwe’s presidential election — one that independent monitors say Mr. Tsvangirai won, though probably not by enough to avoid a runoff — Tendai Biti, the opposition’s secretary general, accused the governing party led by President Robert Mugabe of carrying out what he called “a constitutional coup d’état.”
The opposition party’s rejection of a runoff is a departure from its earlier stance: It had expressed reluctance about participating a runoff, but stopped short of saying it would not take part in one.
With evidence accumulating that youth militias organized by the ruling party, known as ZANU-PF, are moving through rural areas, beating up opposition supporters and threatening worse if they vote for the opposition in a runoff, Mr. Biti said African leaders must tell Mr. Mugabe to step aside when they gather for an emergency meeting this Saturday in Lusaka, Zambia, to consider the crisis in Zimbabwe.
“This is the endgame of the endgame,” Mr. Biti said. “Checkmate already happened on the 29th of March.”
But the autocratic Mr. Mugabe, who has held power for 28 years, often ruthlessly, is likely to have a few moves left. A spokesman for the government told news agencies in Harare, the capital, that Mr. Mugabe would attend the Lusaka meeting; he has often rallied support among African heads of state in the past with angry denunciations of meddling Western nations,.
Nor has he accepted defeat. His party has demanded a recount of the vote — a vote that has not even been announced yet — and said Thursday in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, that it was now contesting the results in 21 seats in the lower house of Parliament, enough to swing the parliamentary majority back to ZANU-PF.
At the same time, the police have arrested eight election officials on charges of fraud in the counting of votes. The opposition and trade union groups say the arrests appear to be a bald attempt to intimidate the country’s electoral commission to rig the vote in a recount.
The state’s move against the election officials was severe. The Herald reported, for example, that the police arrested a primary-school headmaster, Shadreck Mufute, 47, “on allegations of depriving President Mugabe of 10 votes which he allegedly gave to Morgan Tsvangirai in the presidential race.”
The state opposed giving Mr. Mufute bail. The magistrate granted him bail of $600 million in Zimbabwean currency — only about 14 United Stated dollars on the black market — but required that he report to a police base every Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Herald reported that Mr. Mufute’s lawyers denied the authenticity of the document used as the basis of the charge against him and said he had neither prepared it nor signed it.
Nelson Chamisa, an opposition spokesman, said a decision had not yet been made whether Mr. Tsvangirai would attend the emergency weekend meeting of southern Africa’s heads of state on the political crisis gripping the country. But there were some indications that Mr. Mugabe would. “If there is a S.A.D.C. meeting of heads of state, then obviously he will attend,” Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga said of Mr. Mugabe, The Associated Press reported.
On Wednesday, Mr. Tsvangirai traveled to Botswana as part of his continuing campaign to seek international support to end the crisis and remove Mr. Mugabe. In an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Tsvangirai said Mr. Mugabe was carrying out a “de facto military coup” to keep his grip on power, but would be ousted with the help of other African countries.
“We’ll manage to get Mugabe out,” he said in the interview, according to Time’s Web site. “Mugabe is being deserted. No one wants to touch Mugabe in the region now. Eventually, we will ease him out.”
Jeff Ramsay, a government spokesman in Botswana, said that nation’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, met with Mr. Tsvangirai on Wednesday morning. He said the president would attend the summit.
(Page 2 of 2)
“I am sure he is concerned,” he said of the president’s attitude to the situation in Zimbabwe. “Obviously we hope things will remain peaceful and that Zimbabweans will find common ground.”
With the threat of political violence looming in Zimbabwe, the regional association acted after Zimbabwe’s political opposition complained about “the deafening silence” from its African neighbors and warned that the electoral standoff could turn increasingly violent without international intervention.
Already, the opposition has said, about 200 of its polling agents, campaign workers and other supporters have been arrested, beaten or kidnapped since the March 29 election.
A number of Western governments and leaders have also expressed serious concern that the government had still not released the results of the presidential race, and they have demanded that the election tally be quickly posted.
In calling an emergency meeting of the southern African bloc, Levy Mwanawasa, the Zambian president and the chairman of the group, seemed to answer the opposition’s call for intervention. He said “nothing should be done by anybody that would further give rise to heightened tension in Zimbabwe.”
It was unclear whether Zimbabwe’s neighbors — many of them with political or fraternal bonds to Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old president and liberation hero — could or would do much to defuse one of the most ominous political crises since Zimbabwe waged a regional civil war some 25 years ago.
In recent years, Zimbabwe has descended into economic and social chaos, with 80 percent unemployment, 100,000 percent annual inflation and a hunger emergency affecting four million people. But regional leaders have been loath to express more than mild concern, and have almost never questioned Mr. Mugabe’s leadership.
At a court hearing on Wednesday in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, a lawyer for the government-controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission suggested that a premature release of the results could be dangerous, and that the government might ignore a legal order to make the vote public.
He contended that the electoral commission was still verifying the results of the vote, although the quasi-independent commission long ago released the tallies for parliamentary elections held the same day.
Lawyers for the Movement for Democratic Change, who have asked the court to order the release of the presidential vote, said there was no plausible reason to withhold the collated results of an election whose local outcomes had already been posted, for all to read, on the doors of some 9,000 polling places.
But Mr. Mugabe’s government has accused the opposition’s supporters of trying to rig the outcome. On Wednesday, it announced the arrests of more election officials on charges of falsifying votes against Mr. Mugabe, adding to others already charged. The electoral commission also accepted a governing party request for a recount of votes in five parliamentary constituencies, the justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, told Reuters.
The opposition says the arrests are an attempt to intimidate election officials into awarding Mr. Mugabe a victory in a race that, under any impartial accounting, he has lost.
The opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, said that Mr. Tsvangirai would meet with heads of state in many of Zimbabwe’s neighbors “to get them to appreciate the magnitude of the crisis in Zimbabwe.”
The region, Mr. Tsvangirai told South Africa’s SABC News on Wednesday, “does not need that political chaos and dislocation on their doorstep.”
But South Africa, the one country most likely to hold sway in Zimbabwe’s crisis, took pains on Wednesday to distance itself from the opposition. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had no plans to meet Mr. Tsvangirai, a spokesman for Mr. Mbeki said, although a spokesman for the opposition said Mr. Tsvangirai had requested a meeting.
Separately, South Africa dismissed calls for an international effort to address Zimbabwe’s crisis in the United Nations, saying the political situation there was an internal political matter. South Africa holds the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council this month, a position in which it has added leverage to bring global issues before the body for debate.
Mr. Mbeki, Africa’s favored mediator in Zimbabwe’s political crisis, has sometimes been accused of treating Mr. Mugabe’s harsh rule with kid gloves. Asked Wednesday whether South Africa had again rebuffed Mr. Mugabe’s opponents, Mr. Chamisa replied, “Time will tell.”
Mr. Mugabe’s handling of Zimbabwe’s elections drew a second rebuke on Wednesday from Simba Makoni, a breakaway member of Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party who appears to have captured close to 10 percent of the presidential vote. At a news conference, he argued that the delay in releasing the results only heightened tensions. But Mr. Makoni refused to say whom he might support should Zimbabwe’s presidential vote end in a runoff. The law requires a runoff if no candidate gains more than half the vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/world/africa/11zimbabwe.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
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