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.
Zimbabwe is home to many tourist draws, including the spectacular Victoria Falls and teeming herds of elephants, such as the one seen here at Hwange National Park. But the country also has the world's highest inflation rate—causing such widespread poverty that hungry villagers and poachers have nearly wiped out the country's animals in some areas. Photograph by Jason Edwards/NGS
Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis Nick Wadhams in Nairobi, Kenya for National Geographic News August 1, 2007
Wildlife has been nearly wiped out on Zimbabwe's former private game ranches in the seven years since President Robert Mugabe began seizing and dividing the areas into small plots, a conservation group says.
Some 90 percent of animals have been lost since 2000, while the country has seen an estimated 60 percent of its total wildlife killed off to help ease massive economic woes, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said in a report issued in June.
"[The animals] are being killed indiscriminately," said Johnny Rodrigues, the author of the report. "There's a lot of commercial poaching, there are people on the ground snaring these animals. This is where a lot of the destruction is coming from."
Economic Meltdown For its study, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force gathered information and studied records about 62 game ranches. Fifty-nine reported losses, including the killings of a total of 75 rare black rhinoceroses and 39 leopards.
Most of the losses appeared among antelope, including 9,500 impalas, .. heh, watch this one go ..
nearly 5,000 kudus, and .. Kudus (Males) and Waterbucks
2,000 wildebeests. .. Zebras herding wildebeests
The numbers help give a rough estimate of the environmental impact of Zimbabwe's recent descent into economic and political chaos.
Inflation—estimated at 5,000 percent—is now the worst in the world. On Wednesday the government introduced a 200,000 Zimbabwean dollar bill—which is worth only about $1 dollar U.S. on the black market.
The economic meltdown has had a wide-ranging and devastating impact on what is one of Africa's premier tourist draws. Zimbabwe's wildlife parks teem with herds of elephants and rhinos, as well as sights such as Victoria Falls.
Along with plummeting wildlife numbers, the country has seen massive deforestation and the neglect of some national parks. At Hwange National Park, for example, animals have been killed off by severe drought, a problem exacerbated by scarce gasoline supplies.
There is no longer enough fuel to power the pumps that feed the watering pans where animals gather.
Policy Disaster Until now there had only been anecdotal evidence of widespread slaughter on the private ranches that were occupied under President Mugabe's controversial land redistribution program. That policy, implemented in 2000, is seen as a central reason for Zimbabwe's economic collapse.
Mugabe argued at the time that the reforms would reverse decades of discrimination and help Zimbabwe shed its colonial past, when wealthy white farmers snapped up some of the country's best land.
Yet once he expelled the farmers and subdivided the land, the farms that made Zimbabwe Africa's breadbasket collapsed, and some of the country's most basic foodstuffs became impossible to find.
And as a result, the subsistence farmers who moved in—often dubbed "war veterans" by the regime—began to hunt wildlife that had thrived, and in many cases, been protected on the ranches. Government regulations meant to shield the animals have been disobeyed, and wildlife officials have been forced to focus their limited resources on Zimbabwe's national parks and reserves, where the damage is less severe.
According to the task force, Zimbabwe had 620 private game farms before the land seizures began, but now has 14. And of 14 conservancies before 2000, only one remains.
Snare Traps Because of the proliferation of snares, many of the animals on these former ranches have been maimed, report author Rodrigues said.
"They're telling the world they want the tourists to come back, but the tourists aren't going to come back because most of the animals you see nowadays have amputated legs," he said. "It's just like a rehabilitation center."
The report acknowledges that the findings are still preliminary—many of the farmers whose land was seized have left the country, so in some cases the group had to rely on hazy reports from people still near the former ranches. "We are not claiming to 'know' how much wildlife has been lost," the report said. "We have just tried to make the most accurate estimate possible with very limited data to work with."
Still, the trend is a disaster, because Zimbabwe once had some of the world's most progressive and successful conservation policies.
Elephant populations there have boomed, and on conservation areas that are strictly monitored and controlled, rhinoceros populations are growing. (Related: "5-Country Conservation Area Would Aid Africa's Largest Elephant Herd" [April 4, 2007].)
Matter of Survival Part of the reason for the decline is that poachers from neighboring countries have entered Zimbabwe to hunt its animals. Another is the booming trade in bush meat. "It's a matter of survival," said George Kampamba, coordinator of the conservation nonprofit WWF's African Rhino Program. "For people to really survive, now that poverty levels are so high, they have to do what they're doing—which is the bush meat trade."
The government too has turned on the animals. Rodrigues said the government slaughtered a hundred elephants last year so their meat could be served as part of Independence Day celebrations.
And his group has also reported that Zimbabwe recently sold ivory to China in exchange for military hardware.
Wildlife destruction has become so severe that even Zimbabwe's authoritarian government is acknowledging mistakes.
"Errors that were made were not intentional," Environment Secretary Margaret Sangarwe told the state-owned Herald newspaper.
"An area of concern is the resettling of people in some areas meant for wildlife rearing, and ensuring that our wildlife is safe."
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
