Fear Clouds Zimbabwe Election

Anxiety, fear and lawlessness characterize the countdown to Zimbabwe’s decisive presidential election next month, government opponents, human rights activists and political analysts in neighboring South Africa said Tuesday.

A series of repressive laws stifling civil liberties, a seemingly state-sponsored campaign of violence and intimidation, and the failure of international arbitration to ease the country’s political crisis have dashed hopes of a peaceful, free and fair vote.

President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe for 22 years, since it won independence from Britain, faces his most formidable challenge yet next month from Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Mugabe’s actions and rhetoric indicate a fierce unwillingness to give up the country’s top job, observers say, and the fight for political power threatens to push Zimbabwe to the brink of anarchy.

“The more the ruling party sees it cannot get what it wants, the more desperate it becomes,” said Roy Bennett, an MDC lawmaker from the country’s southeast.

On Tuesday, the Zimbabwean government condemned the European Union’s decision to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on Mugabe and several ministers after the southern African nation refused to let EU observers freely monitor the vote. The team of observers was ordered home, two days after Zimbabwe expelled the head of the monitoring mission.

“There is no amount of hostile action through sanctions or otherwise that will make us move from our principle to defend our independence,” Information Minister Jonathan Moyo told the state-run Herald newspaper. “We will never allow a situation where our sovereign rights are hijacked under the guise of elections observation.”

The sanctions include cutting off $110 million in development aid, banning travel to EU nations for Mugabe and 20 of his Cabinet ministers, and freezing their assets in Europe.

But human rights activists, opposition politicians and church leaders say the sanctions have come too late to counter the violence, intimidation and draconian laws that have already done much to help the ruling party manipulate the election.

According to the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, a coalition of local rights groups, eight people have been killed in politically motivated attacks in Zimbabwe this month, bringing the number of dead since the start of the year to 25. Four of the recent victims were identified as opposition supporters, two as backers of the ruling party and two of no determined political affiliation. Cases of torture, rape and kidnappings have also surged, the forum said.

In recent months, new laws have curbed political gatherings, free speech and the right to strike. Criticizing Mugabe is punishable by a hefty jail sentence.

Last week, Garfield Todd, a former prime minister of Southern Rhodesia--the forerunner to Zimbabwe--was stripped of his Zimbabwean citizenship. A celebrated champion of black majority rule who helped Mugabe come to power, the 93-year-old Todd had become one of the president’s strongest critics.

On Thursday, Todd, who was born in New Zealand, was informed that he had ceased to be a citizen of Zimbabwe, was not permitted to travel and had lost his right to vote. Like most white Zimbabweans born elsewhere, he had been carrying dual citizenship and had failed to comply with the government’s demand last year to renounce one of them.

Todd, who lives in the southwestern city of Bulawayo, has vowed to vote anyway.

Todd is just one of thousands of Zimbabweans facing the prospect of disenfranchisement.

Last year, Zimbabwe’s parliament took away the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of its citizens living abroad by scrapping absentee balloting and making it a prerequisite for voters to have lived for more than a year in their constituencies. The regulation excludes military forces serving in Congo and staff members at diplomatic missions abroad.

Hundreds of citizens are being disenfranchised through the use of other underhanded tactics, human rights officials say. In rural areas, gangs of thugs, under the banner of youth brigades, have reportedly been confiscating the identity cards of suspected opposition supporters.

“If you don’t have your ID, you cannot vote,” said David Jamali, programs coordinator at ZimRights, a rights group based in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. “So there is some silent rigging going on.”

Jamali said his organization had also received reports that residents in high-density areas were being forced to attend ruling party meetings or risk having their identification documents seized.

“ZANU-PF does not have much support in the urban areas,” opposition lawmaker Edwin Mushoriwa said, referring to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. “So this is a desperation tactic to try to instill fear into residents.”

Violence is proving to be an effective weapon in rural Zimbabwe, which has spiraled into chaos since ruling party militants began occupying white-owned farms two years ago, demanding that they be handed over to landless blacks.

Whites own about 70% of Zimbabwe’s best farmland. The government has targeted about 5,000 white-owned farms, on land it says was stolen by British settlers, in a plan to redistribute it to blacks.

Nine white farmers have been killed in the violence, and thousands of black laborers are jobless after militants forced them from farms.

Opposition officials accuse Mugabe of using land seizures as a preelection ploy to garner support.

The president argues that he is correcting a great injustice, and he has vowed to continue with the land reform program to ensure that whites are removed and most landless black families are resettled.

“The time has now come to address the land imbalance and crush the head of the snake once and for all,” Mugabe told supporters at a rally last week.

Viewed by his supporters as the father of the liberation struggle, Mugabe commands deep respect, particularly in rural Zimbabwe.

“Before independence, there was only one university, but we are now happy that our children now have opportunities to be educated,” Solomon Tawengwa, a ZANU-PF deputy secretary for finance, recently told a pro-Mugabe rally. Mugabe often urges his supporters not to forget the revolution that brought the country to independence and has warned Zimbabweans against selling out and becoming puppets of the country’s former “white oppressors.”

“They are trying to convince young people that if the ruling party doesn’t win, the country will return to another pre-independence war,” said Bennett, the opposition lawmaker.