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Chicago Tribune
Apr 30, 2008

Suspiciously delayed poll results, army trucks fanning out through villages, police ransacking opposition party offices, and reports of torched huts and broken-limbed civilians _ such has been the ugly face of democracy for nearly a decade in Zimbabwe, and by now most political experts have given up asking whether millions of Zimbabweans will ever reach a violent breaking point.

Indeed, even as fresh reports of government brutality seep out of Zimbabwe in the wake of the still-unresolved March presidential election, there are virtually no reports of unrest on the streets.

A call for a mass protest two weeks ago by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which claims it won the vote, fizzled as usual. Hungry citizens queued obediently for bread in the capital, Harare, last week even as cops rounded up hundreds of opposition activists. And the lone report of a violent backlash _ an alleged attack by opposition members on a rural army barracks on Tuesday _ remains unconfirmed. Human rights activists suspect it may have been planted by the regime of strongman Robert Mugabe to justify further arrests.

This deep well of stoicism _ or, as some critics sneer, passivity _ in Zimbabwe’s victimized population has for years been a source of puzzlement to many Africa analysts, humanitarian workers and foreign journalists, who contrast Zimbabweans’ seemingly inexhaustible acceptance of suffering with deadly explosions of electoral fury elsewhere in Africa, most recently in Kenya.

“This is the single greatest mystery of Zimbabwe,” marveled a Western diplomat in Harare who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “In most other countries there would’ve been riots and violence years ago. But not here. These people are just too nice.”

The Zimbabwean
30th April 2008

Wayne Munroe, a farmer in Nymandlovhu (just outside Bulawayo in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe), has been under siege since early this morning. His property has been encircled by in excess of 100 “war veterans”.

He phoned the police in Nymandlovhu to inform them of the problem and was on the phone to them when 4 “war veterans” entered his office. He immediately told the member in charge that they were there and that a 303 (gun) was being pointed at his chest. He was forced to hang up.

A tussle ensued: Munroe was injured on the hand with the head of an axe blade and he sprayed the attackers with pepper spray enabling him to escape.

He was fired at 4 times, but they missed, and Munroe managed to get to the farm house where his mother and grandmother live.

The war veterans moved into the compound outside the perimeter fence and are busy right now beating the workers.

Munroe’s wife and his two children, aged 4 and 5, are holed up in their own house some 100m away.

One of the workers managed to escape the beating at the compound (which is outside the perimeter fence of both farm houses) and managed to get to Munroe.

He told Munroe that after they finished beating the workers, they were coming for the farmhouses.

Mrs Munroe (Ursula) managed to phone out that she was going to attempt getting to her husband, but has failed because more armed “war veterans” have moved in.

She is currently there now.

Senator David Coltart has repeatedly called Chief Inspector Munyira at Nymandlovhu to go and assist the Munroes.

30 April 2008
By Dumisani O.Nkomo

Dumisani Nkomo is the Chief Executive Officer of Habakkuk Trust which a Zimbabwean based information and Advocacy organization.

The electoral impasse and political crisis that is currently dogging Zimbabwe could culminate in a number of scenarios, some being desirable, others undesirable but possible and yet others desirable and possible. It is therefore, necessary for Zimbabweans from all walks of life and through organized political space to begin to interrogate the future before the nation becomes the victim of a tragic fate.

If Tsvangirai won the election, a scenario highly possible but most undesirable and unpalatable for ZANU PF especially the so called hawks in the party, that of the M.D.C Tsvangirai forming the next government, the biggest challenge they would face is to translate this electoral victory to practical access to power.

Hardliners in the Joint Operations Command could resist an M.D.C government taking over. The M.D.C could however exploit support from ordinary members of the army, police, air force and intelligence organs most of whom have been wallowing well below the poverty datum line for years .Tsvangirai would need the support of some crucial senior army officers in order for him to win over the military and it is hoped that the party is engaging critical players in that establishment in order to get the reins of power.

Given this scenario, different opposition players would have to display exceptional political maturity by agreeing to work together in the legislature to facilitate the smooth passage of legislation and policies. The current situation where a minority party, the MDC Mutambara, has the deciding seats in parliament is extremely healthy for democracy. With no party having an absolute majority in parliament, the two factions of the MDC by design or by default would have to develop a symbiotic relationship as they have both intimated recently. This may be undermined by hawks in both factions who may be keen on taking entrenched positions which may not be in the national interest.

Crikey.com.au

Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Interview by Thomas Hunter:

David Coltart is a senator with the Zimbabwean opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. He first spoke to Crikey on 8 April, a week after the election. Three weeks on, Mugabe clings to power, with an announcement expected this week on the result of the crucial Presidential vote.

News reports suggest that there will be announcement this week on the result of the presidential election. Is Zimbabwe likely to learn who won, or will it be a result that demands a run-off election?

I think its more likely that a run-off election will be called. As far back as Wednesday 2 April, the Herald newspaper, which is the Harare-based government controlled daily, ran a story saying that there would be a run-off. They knew the figures as far back as then. The government line ever since then has been that there would be a run-off. So it will be very surprising if we get anything but a run-off. The electoral act says that a run-off must occur within 21 days from the conclusion of the previous election, which we as lawyers believe means from the time of the declaration of the results. The moment the result is announced in the presidential election, which might be this week, then the re-run has to be held within 21 days.

There has been some disturbing imagery flowing out of Zimbabwe in recent weeks. According to the reports accompanying it, voters who supported the opposition in the election are being intimidated by Mugabe supporters to change their vote in any follow-up poll. Does that accord with the information you have?

Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Nonthando Bhebhe in Harare
24 April 2008

Ruling party insiders say President Mugabe is effectively hostage to his security chiefs’ demands for continuity.

Officials of the ruling ZANU-PF party say President Robert Mugabe is no longer fully in control, with much of the government’s day-to-day affairs being run by military and security chiefs.

Senior ZANU-PF insiders have told IWPR that Mugabe is now out of touch with what is happening on the ground.

Instead, they said, key decisions were being made by the Joint Operations Command, JOC, which consists of the heads of the army, air force, prison services and intelligence. The JOC, which is chaired by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Constantine Chiwenga, coordinates military and security affairs and many observers believe it carries more real clout than the cabinet.

Their ties with Mugabe date back to the liberation struggle of the Seventies.

The party officials, who did not want to be identified, said decision-making was taken over by military and security chiefs after it became clear that Mugabe had lost the March 29 presidential election to Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC.

It was they who made the controversial decision to stop the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, ZEC, from releasing the result of the ballot.

According to these sources, Mugabe was considering stepping down but was forced to carry on when the military threatened to take over if he resigned.

“Mugabe was willing to step down. He had actually indicated that he would retire to his rural home and his Borrowdale mansion and hand over power to Tsvangirai, if people voted for him,” said one official. “He even said he was willing to surrender his fate to Tsvangirai, to do whatever he wanted with him.

Cutting Edge
By Priya Abraham
April 21st 2008

To listen to Robert Mugabe’s latest rant on western imperialism, one would think history has not shaken the 84-year-old liberator-turned-dictator of Zimbabwe.

“We need to maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations,” he told a crowd of thousands in Harare’s Gwanzura stadium on April 18, Zimbabwe’s Independence Day. Banners at the stadium further warned against “sell-outs” to Britain.

In reality, Mugabe is facing perhaps the strongest challenge to his power since he took over from white minority rule in 1980. In national elections held March 29—and still under dispute–Zimbabwe’s opposition won control of the nation’s 210-seat parliament, winning 107 seats to the ruling party ZANU-PF’s 97.

Mugabe has now completely lost any remaining legitimacy he held in Zimbabwe and the world. Zimbabwe’s tenacious and beleaguered opposition movement has new hope: “Don’t forget we have won,” wrote Sokwanele, a civil rights coalition, as it urged Zimbabweans to continue pressing for peaceful, democratic renewal. Under this new calculus, the question now is how long Zimbabweans will wait for Mugabe to go.

Mugabe is beyond caring what the world thinks, and that attitude rippled even in Washington circles. Just as an example, His ambassador to the United States agreed to speak at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, on April 15, then blew off the event as reporters and others waited for his arrival. His staff made little effort to inform anyone that he was “out of town.”
In this election, there is no doubt about the victor: in a slight but profound concession, the country’s 9,000 polling stations were each required to post their results outside. Zimbabweans and civic groups traveled from one polling station to another logging the results for themselves. In previous elections, officials tallied—and tampered with–ballots at a central counting station.

The Independent on Sunday
By Raymond Whitaker in Bulawayo
Sunday, 20 April 2008

Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the presumed front-runner in the presidential election held three weeks ago, has said he intends to remain out of the country for the time being for fear of being attacked or imprisoned.

“It is no use going back to Zimbabwe and become captive,” the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, who left Zimbabwe 10 days after the poll, told Canada’s The Globe and Mail. “Then you are not effective. What can you do? Do you want a dead hero?”

Mr Tsvangirai, who has spent most time recently in South Africa, said he would return, but first wanted to mobilise international support against President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF government. The ruling party lost its majority in the 29 March election, and independent monitoring groups calculate that the MDC leader fell just short of a first-round victory in the presidential poll, securing between 49 per cent and 50 per cent of the vote.

After an initial period of turmoil, Mr Mugabe and his associates have embarked on a clear strategy of seeking to reverse the result of both polls. The result of the presidential election has been withheld, and MDC officials and supporters in Zanu-PF’s former strongholds have been attacked. Some officials of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) have been arrested, along with members of the country’s largest voluntary poll monitoring group.

The Boston Globe
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / April 20, 2008

IN RETROSPECT , it was an exercise in naiveté to have imagined that Zimbabwe’s brutal strongman, Robert Mugabe, would relinquish power just because he had lost an election. It has been more than three weeks since the March 29 vote in which Mugabe’s party, known as ZANU-PF, lost control of the lower house of parliament. Yet official results in the presidential contest between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have yet to be released.

There isn’t much doubt who won. Public tallies posted at each polling station showed Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, garnering more than 50 percent of the vote. Were the electoral commission to certify those tallies, it would mean Mugabe’s 28 years at the top had come to an end. But the electoral commission, like everything else in Zimbabwe’s government, is controlled by ZANU-PF. So there will be no official results until the books have been cooked to Mugabe’s satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the regime’s thugs have been busy, staging raids against foreign journalists and opposition-party offices, invading farms owned by white Zimbabweans, terrorizing voters in the countryside. US Ambassador James McGee warned last week that Mugabe’s goon squads were carrying out “threats, beatings, abductions, burning of homes, and even murder” in areas where the opposition party ran strong. A group of Zimbabwean doctors say they have treated more than 150 people who had been beaten since the election. Hundreds more have been detained, and the MDC says at least two of its workers have been murdered.

Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

JOHANNESBURG, April 15 — Zimbabwe’s military has taken day-to-day control of key elements of the national government, limiting the authority of President Robert Mugabe as he struggles to maintain power after 28 years, according to senior government sources, Western diplomats and analysts.

Mugabe’s clout has diminished as military forces deploy widely across Zimbabwe’s countryside and in government agencies. Among those agencies is the electoral commission, which has refused to release results from the March 29 election and would manage a runoff vote, if one is eventually scheduled.

National decision-making increasingly has been consolidated within the Joint Operations Command, a shadowy group consisting of the leaders of the army, air force, police, intelligence agency and prison service — a group Zimbabweans call the “securocrats.”
Although those officials long have been powerful, their authority in government and political matters grew sharply in the days after the election, when it became clear that Mugabe had lost a first round of balloting to longtime opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Several of the securocrats, whose ties to Mugabe date to Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s, had vowed before the vote never to take orders from Tsvangirai, a former trade union official with no military background.

The shift in power is “an interim measure that is meant to stabilize the country at this critical moment,” said a top government official and Mugabe confidant, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The arrangement is just temporary because once he wins [a runoff vote], as the army expects him to, he will be back in charge.”

Zimbabwe’s political crisis has shown no sign of abating since the election 17 days ago. All sides agree that Mugabe received fewer votes than Tsvangirai, but they disagree as to whether the opposition candidate won the clear majority needed for a decisive first-round victory.

By Roger Bate of America Enterprise Institute
Posted: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
National Review Online

A company with links to a U.S. government contractor is enabling Robert Mugabe despotic rule in Zimbabwe by printing bank notes. In the past month, these increasingly worthless notes have been used to bribe officials in the public sector, army, and other public-security services to curry votes for the Mugabe regime.

In the weeks prior to the March 29 election, with Zimbabwe’s economy collapsing and inflation already running at 100,000 percent, a German company called Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) ran its printing presses at maximum capacity, delivering 432,000 sheets of banknotes to Mugabe’s government each week. The money, equivalent to nearly Z$173 trillion (U.S. $32 million), was then dispersed among targeted voters.

Despite the Mugabe regime’s efforts–illegal as well legal–independent observers say the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election.

Despite the Mugabe regime’s efforts–illegal as well legal–independent observers say the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election. But the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has not released the results. The MDC is fearful that Mugabe is maneuvering to steal a potential run-off contest between the top two candidates (which Zimbabwean law requires within 21 days of the original election if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the first round), or may be tampering with the original vote to fabricate a majority that will ensure his victory. In the meantime, his security services have banned rallies, beaten up MDC politicians, briefly arrested two foreign journalists, and forbidden any EU or U.S. election observers.