Seattle Post
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has increasingly turned to hard-line military commanders to cow his factious country and now is relying on them to ensure a ruling party triumph in March 31 parliamentary elections.
He appointed a former colonel to run the new Election Commission last month and passed laws that placed the army in charge of polling stations and allows military officers to serve as election officials.
Analysts said it follows a trend in recent years of militarizing Zimbabwean society. Mugabe clings to power, they said, by placing men who unflinchingly follow orders in charge of strategic industries and ministries, the secret police, justice system, youth militias and food and fuel distribution.
“The strategy is to get people in key positions that share the hard-line attitudes of the government,” Lovemore Madhuku, the chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, an opposition coalition of churches and unions, said in a telephone interview.
“You appoint the military because they follow orders. They will do what is required,” Madhuku said.
Senior military officers are closely aligned politically to Mugabe, a strongman who has led this country since independence in 1980s, and many have lucrative business ties to ruling party stalwarts.
“Mugabe has never been comfortable with people not in the military. As his popularity has progressively declined, he has run back to the military for his own protection,” said University of Zimbabwe political scientist John Makumbe. This proclivity became more pronounced this winter as the ruling party fractured in December from political infighting.
“He is a frightened man,” said Makumbe, speaking by telephone from the United States, where he is a guest lecturer at Michigan State University. “The infighting shook him greatly. His party is weaker than ever before, more vulnerable. It has enemies without and now seemingly enemies within.”
To shore up military support, troops recently received raises of up to 1,400 percent, said Makumbe.
He said Mugabe has also given large commercial farms confiscated by the government from white farmers to top officers. The army and police services also purged and punished thousands in junior ranks suspected of supporting Mugabe’s opponents.
The upcoming elections “will take place under the most repressive laws in our history. Not a single electoral body is impartial,” said David Coltart, a spokesman for the Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition party.
In a troubling sign for the opposition, members of the Green Bombers, the government youth militia, are being incorporated into security forces and will run polling stations, said Makumbe. The State Department has accused the group of beating and torturing opposition supporters into submission under direction of state officials.
Also, prosecutors around the country, directed by former colonel and new Attorney General Sobuza Gula-Ndebele, are seeking to reinstate charges dropped against opposition activists for lack of evidence.
Nearly all the charges stem from alleged violations of the draconian Public Order and Security Act, a law prohibiting political meetings or discussions without prior police approval that is rarely granted to the opposition.
Meanwhile, George Chiweshe, a former colonel and veteran of the independence war, was picked to run the new Electoral Commission.
Opposition party spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said the party has serious reservations about Chiweshe’s impartiality and independence.
That’s not surprising.
During the last presidential election in 2002, Mugabe was declared the narrow winner in voting independent observers called deeply flawed by intimidation, violence and massive vote rigging.
Just before that vote, another military man, Gen. Vitalis Zvinavashe, said in a statement widely condemned both in Africa and abroad that the country’s military and secret police would not accept an opposition victory. Some junior officers later acknowledged to human rights investigators that they had been forced to stuff ballot boxes for the ruling party and the president.