The two faces of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe’s presidential election
run-off were clearly visible yesterday in the streets of Harare. One was
represented by the 84-year-old president grinning at voters from posters
plastered all over the city, the other by the state-organised violence that
his rhetoric of war has provoked.
The symbol of Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party is a clenched fist. As Friday’s
vote approached, the fist was bared, the mood dark. “It is like a rabid dog
that has gone crazy, snapping at everything that moves,” said one voter.
Mugabe, who is fighting for his political survival after coming second to
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in
the first round of the elections in March, has a dynamic public relations
expert working for him.
A slick publicity campaign run by Sharon Mugabe, a distant relative, includes
images of pretty girls and young men - with clenched fists, but smiling -
along with slogans such as “Total empowerment” and “Total independence”.
Such benign images are a world apart from the cruel reality of Zimbabwe.
Assaults with iron bars, clubs and guns were growing more frequent last week
and even Harare’s most affluent suburbs were beginning to be affected by
slogan-chanting youths.
More gruesome murders were recorded as a vicious crackdown against Mugabe’s
opponents intensified. The horror peaked on Thursday when at least 14
killings were reported in a single day. The victims included four opposition
activists burnt in petrol bombings and the wife of Harare’s newly elected
mayor.
Abigail Chiroto, 27, the wife of Emmanuel Chiroto, was abducted with her son
Ashley, 4, by a gang of Zanu-PF thugs looking for the mayor, an MDC member
elected only last Sunday.
He was not at home when they petrol-bombed the house and took his family away.
The woman’s blindfolded body was dumped at a nearby farm. The boy turned up
at a police station, traumatised by his ordeal. “He is as good as an orphan
now, as his father has gone into hiding to stay alive,” said a relative.
The targeted killings were further evidence that Zimbabwe had moved into a
phase of violence not seen since the murderous campaign against the minority
Ndebele tribe in Mata-beleland in the 1980s, when 20,000 died. Some of those
reputed to have been involved in that campaign are key players in today’s
crackdown.
The latest wave of killings to cow the opposition began in May, soon after it
became clear that Mugabe would fight Tsvangirai in the run-off.
An early victim was Tonderai Ndira, a 33-year-old MDC activist who once said:
“We are prepared to die. It is just the same, we are still dying in
Zimbabwe. We are dying by hunger, by diseases, everything, so there is
nothing to fear.”
Ndira did not have the international renown of Steve Biko, founder of the
Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. But he was known and respected
throughout Zimbabwe as a fearless campaigner for justice and was compared to
Biko. He lived in an impoverished constituency east of Harare short of
water, food and electricity, where uncollected rubbish piled up in the
sewage-ridden streets.
The MDC has depended throughout its nine years of existence on brave young men
and women who form the backbone of the party as it struggles against
incredible odds to bring about political change in Zimbabwe by defeating
Mugabe at the ballot box.
As a friend said in an obituary, the manner of Ndira’s murder came from the
darkest days of apartheid – particularly ironic given Zanu-PF’s credentials
as a black African liberation movement that once fought against white rule
and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the African National Congress against
apart-heid-ruled South Africa.
His opposition to Mugabe meant that Ndira had been beaten and tortured
frequently and arrested as many as 32 times. Twice he escaped by jumping out
of a moving truck. But early on the morning of May 14 his luck ran out.
Nine armed men in plain-clothes came to his home, beat him in front of his
wife and children and dragged him away in his underpants. His wife described
how he was frogmarched out of the house and thrown into a white Toyota
pickup truck.
Early reports when his body turned up a few days later suggested that his eyes
had been gouged out and his lips cut off. But these injuries were later
found to have been caused by wild animals after he was dumped. The truth,
which emerged from an autopsy, was no less sinister. He had been squashed
face down in the truck until all the air was squeezed out of his body.
Then, with his head held back, his killers had stuffed something like a cloth
into his mouth until he asphyxiated.
At the time of the murder, Tsvangirai had not been in Zimbabwe for more than a
month. He had been criticised for staying away too long while his supporters
at home were being murdered, assaulted and intimidated. On his return, one
of his first acts was to pay his respects to the dead activist.
This weekend the body count reached 85 and Tendai Biti, Tsvangirai’s deputy,
was charged with subversion and election-rigging - offences that carry the
death penalty - and was ordered to say behind bars until well after the
election. Tsvangirai, 56, began to consider pulling out of the polls.
To withdraw would be to hand Mugabe victory, as he would be declared the
winner unopposed. But Nelson Chamisa, the MDC spokesman, said there was huge
pressure from supporters not to take part in a “charade”.
Since he came to power on independence in 1980, Mugabe had always retained a
semblance of adhering to the electoral process, ensuring that violence
tailed off as soon as election observers were deployed in the last two weeks
of campaigning.
The finesse has gone this time. Mugabe and the powerful Joint Operations
Command of military and security officers overseeing his election seem
unconcerned about hiding their political thuggery from the outside world.
Among the latest atrocities was the killing and mutilation of three
young MDC supporters defending the home of a local leader arrested in
Chi-tungwiza, a township 20 miles south of Harare where more than 1m people
live. They were attacked by Zanu-PF youths and drove them back. But the
youths returned with armed militiamen and seized them. Their bodies were
found in the tall grass beside the main road to Harare. Their skulls were
bashed in and their genitals mutilated.
With the economy in ruins and millions unemployed and needing food aid to
survive, life is getting cheaper. The going rate on the street for a killing
last week was 10 billion Zimbabwean dollars, the equivalent of 50p, and at
Z$5 billion for a beating.
In May alone hospitals treated more than 1,000 victims of the violence, most
for broken bones and torture, and hundreds have poured in since. At least
two heavily pregnant women were severely beaten on the back and buttocks.
The number and severity of the cases were threatening to overwhelm medical
services already suffering from shortages of drugs and manpower.
The violence was centred on rural areas at first because in March Tsvangirai
had swallowed whole swathes of the countryside that had hitherto been Mugabe
strongholds as voters switched their allegiance from Zanu-PF to the MDC. But
as the new polling day approached the violence crept into the towns and
cities. Mugabe’s henchmen know that lowering the MDC’s big urban vote would
work in the president’s favour.
In the past few days Zanu-PF youths and war veterans in eight or nine centres
across Harare were systematically using coercion, threats and assaults, just
as they had in the countryside.
There were several incidents of people being beaten up at shopping centres and
car drivers being forced to sing Zanu-PF slogans. Those who did not know the
words were abused or worse. Some MDC activists were evicted from their
homes. In the city’s affluent suburbs, gangs were forcing maids and
gardeners to attend indoctrination sessions.
How the violence will affect voting if the election goes ahead is the subject
of fevered speculation. The results of the first round on March 29 suggest
that Mugabe has to make up 160,000 votes to beat Tsvangirai. Zanu- PF is
expected to claim that extra votes have come from supporters of the third
presidential candidate, Sim-ba Makoni, a renegade Zanu-PF member who won 8%
of the vote.
To clinch it, however, widespread rigging has been going on side by side with
the intimidation. Partial figures obtained from four key provinces suggest
that at least 40,000 identity cards have been removed from MDC supporters in
recent weeks, denying them the opportunity to vote. Some have surrendered
their cards in return for food.
Tens of thousands of people displaced by the violence will also have
difficulty in voting this time round. Many soldiers and policemen have been
forced to vote early and in some cases their postal ballots have been
countersigned by a senior officer to see that they voted “correctly”.
In another breathtakingly cynical ploy, the Ministry of Agriculture has put
dozens of Zanu-PF youths and militants on its payroll to make them civil
servants, thus enabling them to act as election officials.
Just how confident are the generals and security chiefs that the
violence and rigging will deliver victory? There were reports last week of
bickering within the Joint Operations Command over the level of attacks,
with some saying it had been counterproductive. The Central Intelligence
Organisation, the only state body that had the temerity to tell Mugabe
before the March election that he could lose, has been seeking a genuine
sense of voting intentions.
Its conclusions may not be very different from those of one reputable
independent poll circulating among diplomats in Harare last week. This said
63% of those polled were prepared to vote for Tsvangirai.
Adding to the concern of those overseeing the election for Mugabe, African
leaders began to desert him. Acknowledging that there was “every sign” the
elections could not be free or fair, Ber-nard Membe, the Tanzanian foreign
minister, whose country holds the rotating African Union presidency, said
some of Mugabe’s last allies now recognised that “this disgrace cannot go
on”.
Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, who has been widely discredited
for his appeasement of Mugabe, tried last week to persuade the president and
opposition leader to enter a government of national unity. He was rebuffed.
This weekend Britain’s minister for Africa, Lord Malloch-Brown, called for
worldwide isolation of Mugabe’s regime, warning that the president’s top
“securocrats” must be singled out to avert a civil war.
The seven most powerful figures surrounding Mugabe will be threatened with
international arrest warrants, travel bans and the freezing of their
overseas assets in an attempt to convince them to switch sides.
“The plan is to crush their economic interests and make them unable to travel
anywhere in the world without risk of international arrest warrants,”
Malloch-Brown said.
The targets all sit on the Joint Operations Command. They include Emmerson
Mnangagwa, the former intelligence chief, known as “the Crocodile”; General
Constantine Chiwenga, the overall military commander; Augustine Chihuri, the
police commissioner; General Paradzai Zimondi, head of prisons; Per-ence
Shiri, the air force chief; and Gideon Gono, the governor of the reserve
bank.
“A lot of people in the coming days and weeks will be making the calculation
‘When is the right time to jump?’ because the risks of staying with Mugabe
are too high,” Malloch-Brown said.
Yesterday youths were smothering more walls in Harare with their posters of
the grinning Mugabe. But the soft selling of the president fooled nobody.
Around State House, soldiers with fixed bayonets stood guard. Trucks carrying
chanting youths rumbled through populated areas, spreading fear. That and
the bodies of men and women who were killed because they wanted a better
future for their ruined country - men like Ndira and women like Chiroto –
provided the grim, true picture.
