Mugabe foe seeks support

Amid rising concerns about violence and intimidation in rural Zimbabwe, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called on Western and African leaders Monday to demand the release of presidential election results, still not announced nine days after the vote.

The state-owned Herald quoted President Robert Mugabe as warning that white farmers were poised to grab farms from black Zimbabweans, in what has emerged as the centerpiece of the ruling party campaign in a second round.

“This is our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites. We don’t want to hear this fight is going backward,” Mugabe said Sunday, according to the Herald.

Commercial Farmers’ Union spokesman Trevor Gifford said 23 farms were besieged Monday by mobs of Mugabe-aligned war veterans demanding that farmers vacate within hours. There were also further reports of opposition activists in rural areas being beaten, threatened or arrested.

Opposition leaders are angry about the failure of southern African leaders to condemn the delay in announcing results of an election they believe they won and the renewal of intimidation by the hard-line war veterans. “Major powers here, such as South Africa, the U.S. and Britain, must act to remove the white-knuckle grip of Mugabe’s suicidal reign and oblige him and his minions to retire,” Tsvangirai wrote in the British newspaper the Guardian. “How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths?”

In an address in London Sunday, South African President Thabo Mbeki said there was “a hopeful picture” in Zimbabwe, continuing his nonconfrontational policy of “quiet diplomacy,” which has been attacked by critics at home. Mbeki met earlier in the day with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Mbeki has previously said it is best to wait for the Zimbabwean election results.

The opposition has launched court action to compel the release of the results. And U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the Zimbabwe Election Commission to release the results “expeditiously and with transparency.”

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington that the release was “overdue.”

With Mbeki overseas, Tsvangirai flew to South Africa to meet the leader’s rival, Jacob Zuma, president of the ruling African National Congress, for talks on Zimbabwe. Zuma is seen as Mbeki’s heir apparent, unless convicted of corruption charges at a trial scheduled for August. Neither side had any comment on the talks between Zuma and Tsvangirai.

In rural areas of Zimbabwe that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change led in voting against the ruling ZANU-PF party, war veterans who support Mugabe continued to mobilize. War veteran leader Jabulani Sibanda, a key Mugabe ally, said in a phone interview that it was too early to say how the campaign would play out.

“We are still waiting for the results. The results will give us a direction: whether it’s a rerun or an outright win,” he said.

Sibanda, who said he thought a rerun would be necessary, organized rallies in support of Mugabe last year, in the lead-up to the ruling party’s December endorsement of Mugabe as its presidential candidate. He was at the heart of a pro-Mugabe war veterans rally in Harare, the capital, last week

He said there were reports that some election commission agents had taken foreign currency from “foreign sponsors” in return for falsifying results.

Wilfred Mhanda of the Zimbabwe Liberators Platform, a group of war veterans not aligned with Mugabe, said the issue of land was “an exhausted platform. It has no takers.”

He said rural voters were fed up with poverty and hunger and blamed Mugabe for their suffering. But he said Mugabe would use any means to get a working majority in the parliament and win a second presidential round.

“He’ll pull out all stops. He will unleash violence in the rural areas to win back the rural areas. He will mobilize militias in the countryside . . . the rogue war veterans and also apply pressure on the traditional leaders.

“It’s quite possible they can scare the daylights out of electoral agents to have a free hand to do whatever they like.”

Meanwhile, New York Times reporter Barry Bearak, detained since Thursday for covering the elections without government permission, was arraigned and released on bail Monday, the Times reported.

The Pulitzer Prize winner was sent to a medical clinic, having suffered back injuries as a result of a fall from the concrete bunk in his cell, the Times said, quoting one of his Zimbabwean lawyers.

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com