Mugabe’s foes brace for fallout

As Robert Mugabe was inaugurated Sunday to a new five-year term as Zimbabwe’s president, critics and analysts warned that his pattern of violent revenge against opponents could be repeated in coming months in an attempt to destroy his chief rival’s party.

The announcement of Mugabe’s inauguration at the State House in Harare and the issuing of invitations were so hasty that both came several hours before the results of Friday’s one-man presidential runoff were released.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission eventually reported that Mugabe had received 2.1 million votes to 233,000 for Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change, who withdrew from the race June 22 because of intensifying violence against opposition supporters.

In a significant blow for Mugabe’s bid to be accepted as Zimbabwe’s legitimate president, regional observers from the Southern African Development Community rejected the election as not representing the will of the people. The group’s observers, rarely critical of a member nation’s election, raised concerns about the political violence and displacement of people. Observers with the Pan-African Parliament also condemned the election and strongly criticized the violence and intimidation.

The criticism by African observers leaves Mugabe in a difficult situation as he flies to Egypt for an African Union summit today, at which the election will probably be raised.

He also faces pressure from the Bush administration and the British government, which have threatened to impose new sanctions against his regime and to press for strong action by the United Nations as early as today.

But China, which has had some arms trade with Zimbabwe, indicated that it might resist the effort, and it holds a veto as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. When pressed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the idea of an arms embargo at a meeting Sunday in Beijing, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi was vague.

“The most pressing task now is to stabilize the situation in Zimbabwe,” Yang told reporters after the meeting. “China, as a responsible country, will also play a constructive role in this process.”

In a phone interview Sunday, Tsvangirai said he feared that the violence that marked the election was not over.

“This is war, this is not an election. These people are for the total annihilation of the MDC,” he said. “I think this violent campaign may be reduced to hit squads targeted at our leaders, MPs and councilors to get control of the parliament.”

Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence from Britain in 1980, had come in second to Tsvangirai in the first round of voting in March that also saw his party lose its majority in parliament. Declaring his determination to stay in power, he fought the election runoff as a military-style campaign run by generals and security chiefs.

Hundreds of command bases were set up across the country, run by liberation war veterans and soldiers and manned by youth militias tied to the ruling party, who hunted down opposition activists and beat them, sometimes to death.

The election slogans for the ruling ZANU-PF party summed up Mugabe’s view of himself as Zimbabwe’s unquestioned leader and the opposition as an enemy force bent on allowing the recolonization of the country by Britain.

“Mugabe is right,” was the simple declaration on posters around Harare. Another read, “This is the final battle for total control.”

After Mugabe was declared the winner, ZTV state television erupted in triumphalism, with “Congratulations Winner” flashing repeatedly. Religious commentators on ZTV read biblical excerpts to back the proposition that the country must unite around one leader anointed by God.

A prayer at the inauguration said it was a “divine day” and called for God to grant Mugabe “divine authority that only comes from you.”

“In this new struggle for our country, many of our comrades lost life, limb and property,” Mugabe declared Sunday, as though referring to a battle rather than an election. “Those people who have lost their lives in this gallant struggle, rest in peace assured that we remain vigilant to protect Zimbabwe’s heritage.”

But Human Rights Watch reported that the preelection violence was overwhelmingly perpetrated by the ruling ZANU-PF and against Tsvangirai’s supporters. Independent doctors said 85 people had died and 3,000 were seriously injured. The casualties may be even higher: The opposition says there are 200 activists missing and presumed dead. An additional 200,000 were displaced, it says.

The violence that accompanied Mugabe’s struggle to retain power echoed his past behavior, several observers said, and raised concerns about what is to come.

“Every time Mugabe is cornered, he resorts to violence,” said Oskar Wermter, a Catholic priest in the crowded Mbare neighborhood on the outskirts of Harare. “It’s a warlike atmosphere. [Mugabe] and his colleagues live in the past in the glory days of the liberation war in the 1970s. They’re still in the trenches. They see themselves as in the same confrontation with the British and the whites.

“There’s a possibility that now that they have manipulated the elections they will go further and crush the opposition and keep hitting them and annihilate them once and for all.”

He said in Mbare, youth militias were beating people who had not voted. Human Rights Watch also reported punitive beatings of people for not going to the polls.

Dumiso Dabengwa, a senior liberation war veteran who defected from the ruling party this year, said Mugabe had always been violent and ruthless, even in his early days when he rose to be leader of the liberation movement ZANU, which later became ZANU-PF.

“It’s always been there,” Dabengwa said Sunday. He said those who opposed Mugabe as leader of ZANU were punished or jailed. Mugabe’s first election campaign at independence in 1980 was not free or fair, he said, but the West overlooked the problems.

“Twenty thousand people died and nobody raised a fist in the whole of the Western world,” Dabengwa said.

According to Heidi Holland, author of the book “Dinner With Mugabe,” which was based in part on a lengthy and rare interview with him last year, the violence of the election “has got Mugabe written all over it. If you go to war, you go to war with your generals.”

She saw him as a quiet, closed figure who believes a person must hide emotions so that no one can determine what he or she is thinking.

“He’s not had a friend, all his life, and he admitted that to me. He said he used to like being by himself. He liked living in his head. He’s a very clever man and completely cut off from his feelings so he can operate in a way that no one else can.”

Holland described Mugabe as “extremely vengeful” and predicted that he would try in the coming months to eliminate the opposition.

“When he’s rejected or humiliated -- and he knows that he was rejected and that the people voted against him -- he chalks it up and there will be a payback. I am absolutely certain that the violence will continue in the rural areas.”

“He lives in a reality bubble,” Holland said. “Nothing impinges on the way he chooses to see things. He cannot be wrong, he can only be right.

“You can ask him any question, because he knows the answer,” she said. “It’s only when you are skeptical about his answer that he gets sparks in his eyes.”

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Times staff writer Barbara Demick in Beijing contributed to this report.