Poll Watchers Detained for Hours in Zimbabwe

As this country braced for its most hotly contested election since independence, 14 opposition poll watchers were abducted Friday and held for several hours, raising further doubts about the fairness of a weekend vote that follows months of campaign violence.

President Robert Mugabe’s party has ruled Zimbabwe for two decades, and the strong challenge posed by the nascent Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, has startled the country’s entrenched leadership.

Human rights groups and some international observers have accused Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party, or ZANU-PF, of waging a campaign of intimidation against opponents to keep them from the parliamentary polls today and Sunday.

One opinion poll showed strong support for the opposition, but it will be difficult for the MDC to win an overall majority. Mugabe, whose term runs until 2002, is not on the ballot, but the election is seen as a referendum on his autocratic rule and Zimbabwe’s shrinking economy.

Pierre Schori, leader of the 173-member European Union observer mission, said preelection violence raised concerns about how many of Zimbabwe’s 5.1 million voters would show up at the polls.

“When I talk to my observers, with their experience, they have not been used to this amount of violence in previous elections they have observed,” Schori said.

More than 30 people, mostly opposition supporters, have been killed in political violence since February, after Mugabe’s party suffered its first electoral loss with the defeat of a constitutional referendum it backed.

On Friday, suspected ruling party militants detained and questioned 14 poll watchers in western Zimbabwe, eventually freeing all but one, said David Coltart, a local MDC candidate.

Throughout the campaign, Mugabe has vilified the MDC, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, as a puppet of the country’s tiny but economically powerful white minority, which he says would return the country to British colonial rule.

“They can never win an election. Not when they are a stooge of the white man. Not when they are there to defend the white settlers,” he told about 10,000 cheering supporters Friday in the farming town of Chinhoyi, about 65 miles west of the capital, Harare.

Mugabe has made whites’ disproportionate control of the country’s farmland a major campaign issue. Since February, thousands of armed Mugabe supporters have occupied more than 1,600 white-owned farms, demanding they be redistributed to landless blacks.

Mugabe has promised to begin seizing the land and parceling it out after the election.

The MDC has accused Mugabe of manipulating the important land issue and undermining the economy for cynical electoral purposes. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates are sky-high, and the recent unrest has scared away tourists and choked off investment.

Tsvangirai toured the capital Friday to meet with voters, starting with a visit to a hospitalized supporter who says he was assaulted by ruling party militants.

The MDC, tapping into strong voter discontent with Zimbabwe’s crashing economy, is contesting all 120 elected seats in the 150-seat parliament. Ten smaller parties and independents also are running.

An independent poll taken last week said the MDC would win 70 of the elected seats, which would leave them short of the 76 seats needed for a majority.