Zimbabwe’s voters may have finally put an end to Robert Mugabe’s wacky reign of terror, error and kleptocracy.
Results posted outside voting centres seemed to show a landslide win on Saturday for opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s party, but Mugabe’s government has warned that any claims of victory before the official results are released will be treated as “an attempted coup” and met with a violent response. Mugabe is delaying that release, and the opposition — and the world — fear that election officials are stalling so they can rig the count.
From the Guardian:
The only official results to have been released were for the 210 parliamentary seats — relatively insignificant compared with the presidential vote.
In early results, Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party suffered major blows early on as several cabinet members including the justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, lost their seats.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change said that what it regards as the overwhelming win by its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, was “under threat” despite growing support for its claim of victory from foreign monitors.
The MDC said the party also said it had “security concerns” after a police raid on its election offices yesterday. Tsvangirai made no public appearances, apparently because of concern for his safety.
Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba, warned Tsvangirai not to declare himself president because that “is called a coup d’etat, and we all know how coups are handled”.
An ominous threat from an ominous government. If the MDC manages a win, it will be despite constant harassment and voter intimidation from the ruling party. One of many examples from Amnesty International:
On March 7, three members of the Morgan Tsvangirai-led faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were putting up election posters in Bulawayo when they were ordered by members of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) to pull them down. The CIO operatives forced a male member of the group to chew the posters and swallow them. A female member of the group was then forced to chew and swallow three-quarters of a poster. The three were allowed to go when the CIO operatives had to go to a political rally.
Along with the intimidation, there’s evidence of massive vote-rigging efforts by Mugabe. CNN reported last week that Zimbabwe ordered 9 million ballots for the election — despite there being only 5.7 million eligible voters in the country. Another 600,000 ballots were printed for the country’s 50,000 soldiers and police officers. There’s only one reason to order 50 per cent more ballots than there are voters…
Among his exploits, Mugabe made “as many as 1 million” slum-dwellers homeless in “Operation Drive Out Filth,” stole the previous national election, established several “torture camps” for turning young villagers into bloodthirsty killers, went on record calling for a round-up of gay people, who he says are “worse than dogs and pigs,” and violently seized white-owned farms, leading to mass starvation in what was once Africa’s breadbasket. Add to that the intimidation, arrests and assaults on opposition leaders, and we have all the hallmarks of a despotic, power-at-all-costs dictator, right down to the moustache.
Incidentally, speculation that his memorable moustache is modelled after another infamous despot’s whiskers was fuelled when in 2003 he declared himself “the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. […] If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times, that is what we stand for.”
And that was at a funeral. Just before his goons beat up some opposition leaders across town.
Zimbabwe’s people have been suffering mightily under Mugabe’s rule. In February, inflation hit a comical 100,000 per cent or more. To put that into perspective, Iraq is in second place worldwide, with a still-enormous 60 per cent inflation rate, and Canada has averaged 1.6 per cent since 1992.
And the World Health Organization says the life expectancy for newborn Zimbabweans is just 37 years for a male and 34 for a woman, in spite of an impressive 90 per cent literacy rate. HIV/AIDS accounts for 41 per cent of deaths in children under five, compared to the African average of seven per cent, and an unbelievable 67 per cent of all deaths in the country — the next leading cause of death is respiratory infection, at four per cent. If Mugabe steals another election, expect “starvation” to creep up that list.
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