Zimbabwe Awaits Results of Election

As vote-counting in Zimbabwe’s bitterly contested presidential election got underway Tuesday, allegations of misconduct continued to undermine the credibility of the poll.

Opposition politicians, local election observers and foreign political analysts charged that the government of longtime President Robert Mugabe had used every trick in the book to try to maintain its grip on power, indicating that no matter what the outcome, it would never concede defeat.

“With their investment in stealing the election, they can’t possibly let the opposition win,” said John Prendergast, Africa program co-director of the International Crisis Group, which monitored the vote.

With 69% of districts reporting, Mugabe had about 55% of the votes to 42% for Morgan Tsvangirai, government officials said. The final tally was expected sometime today.

The election pitted Mugabe, this southern African nation’s only leader since its independence from Britain 22 years ago, against Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist who leads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

Analysts predicted that a victory for Mugabe would lead to an attempt to eradicate any future serious challenge to his rule. They said a low-intensity war against the opposition had already begun with the harassment, assault and arrest of key MDC officials.

The opposition party’s secretary-general, Welshman Ncube, appeared in a court here in the capital Tuesday, charged with high treason for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mugabe. He was later released on bail. Tsvangirai and another opposition figure are also under investigation for allegedly trying to kill the president.

“They should have been arrested a long time ago,” Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s just another example of us bending over [backward] to accommodate [the opposition]. The plot is real. They have questions to answer.”

Treason is a charge punishable by death. The MDC officials have denied the assassination allegation.

Prendergast said the government is likely to continue the intimidation and arrest of high-ranking MDC officials in an attempt to weaken the management structure of the opposition.

“They will manufacture other charges,” Prendergast said.

On Tuesday, local civic groups condemned the election as fundamentally flawed. The Norwegian Election Observation Mission, the largest group of European monitors in Zimbabwe, echoed this sentiment, adding that the poll failed to meet international standards.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of local independent poll monitors, said that huge irregularities up to and during the vote made a mockery of the procedure.

The group’s criticism included flawed voter rolls; intimidation and attacks on voters by police and ruling party militants; and the assignment of polling stations in a way that government critics said clearly favored Mugabe. Opposition officials said the reported turnouts in pro-Mugabe areas didn’t match the reports from their polling agents. They also complained that MDC observers had been locked out of the counting centers in Harare.

“There is no way these elections could be described as substantially free and fair,” said the local monitoring group’s chairman, Reginald Matchaba-Hove.

Voting was originally scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, but a Harare high court judge extended it into Monday after thousands of people were left waiting Sunday night outside polling stations in the capital. On Monday night, a judge rejected an opposition appeal to extend voting to a fourth day.

The government denied allegations of vote-rigging.

“We feel very insulted that anybody in the world would think it possible for us to compromise the integrity of the electoral process when so many people are watching us,” said Moyo, the information minister.

Moyo said that everyone in line before polls closed Monday evening had the opportunity to cast a ballot.

“It’s naive, simplistic and unreasonable to measure a free and fair election by the length of a queue,” Moyo said.

Local and foreign observers and media watched as police, wielding clubs and firing tear gas, forced thousands of Zimbabweans, many of whom had waited three days to vote, to flee polling stations Monday night when the government announced the election closed.

Matchaba-Hove, the election monitoring official, warned that “a flawed electoral process is a potential cause for conflict,” and some observers predicted an explosion of mass civil action that might involve a general strike if Mugabe is declared the winner.

Zimbabwean Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri told state radio Tuesday that the opposition will face the wrath of the law if it makes trouble.