The New York Times
18th March 2005
By Michael Wines and Sharon Lafraniere; Michael Wines reported from Filabusi for this article and Sharon Lafraniere from Johannesburg. An employee of the New York Times in Zimbabwe contributed reporting.
If this is an outpost of tyranny, it was not immediately obvious in this one-road backwater buried in Zimbabwe’s hilly southwest flank.
In a clearing amid donkey carts, rafters-high scrub and at least 3,000 peasants, Zimbabwe’s sole political opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangarai, delivered a throw-the-bums-out harangue aimed at crucial parliamentary elections later this month.
After 25 years of rule by President Robert G. Mugabe’s party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, ”the money you are using presently is as good as old newspapers,” he cried. ”The grain silos are full of cobwebs. There is no harvest this year.”
It was a civics-book image of what Mr. Mugabe, 81, promises for the elections on March 31, possibly his last as president: an honest campaign to rebut accusations that he has devolved into a dictator.
When Mr. Tsvangarai last campaigned three years ago, government-run youth gangs routed supporters with clubs and party members lost homes and even lives to midnight arsonists. On this day, the police briefly detained a few slogan-singing supporters, but otherwise stood idly by.
But there is a vast difference between an obviously peaceful election and a fair one. And with two weeks left to a potentially defining moment for Mr. Mugabe, there is mounting evidence that the raucous campaigning masks an expansive effort by his party to rig the outcome.
Both independent analysts and members of Mr. Tsvangarai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., cite growing barriers to a fair ballot. They say that polling places are scarce in opposition strongholds; that two in five enrolled voters are suspect; that Zimbabwe’s vast, mostly anti-Mugabe diaspora is barred from voting; that the 8,500 election observers are limited to those, like Russians and close African allies, who are likely to rubber-stamp a government victory. Most Westerners are excluded from witnessing the vote.
Foreign journalists are effectively banned from Zimbabwe under threat of arrest (though many enter the country as tourists). Government-run media are heavily biased; broadcast interviews with opposition figures mysteriously drown in static. There is a dearth of independent judges to rule on election complaints. Election oversight is split among a bevy of commissions largely staffed with Mr. Mugabe’s cronies.
Most important, perhaps, the government controls the biggest incentive to undecided voters: the distribution of almost all emergency food in a nation where, agricultural experts say, 4 people in 10 are unsure where to find their next meal.
Given such advantages, ”they probably believe they have won the election and that creating freer conditions on the immediate eve of the election will not hurt,” said Reginald Matchaba-Hove, chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of pro-democracy groups. ”The assumption on Mugabe’s side is that he will get a two-thirds majority in the parliament anyway.”
During a daylong tour of Zimbabwe back-country between Bulawayo and Harare, the capital, candidates for both ZANU-P.F. and the opposition were seen beseeching crowds at groceries and liquor stores. In the mountainous chrome-mining region near Zvishavane, rival candidates were also seen handing out bags, apparently stuffed with corn, from automobiles plastered with their posters.
The police were evident, but none interfered with campaigning.
”Our campaigns are going freely,” said Albert Ndlovu, the M.D.C.’s provincial organizer for Mashonaland West, a rural province of 1.2 million in north-central Zimbabwe. ”There are pockets of violence here and there. But generally, we would say it is a bit quiet.”
Many here see Mr. Mugabe’s loosening of the reins as a calculated gamble by someone supremely confident of victory. Of the 150 seats in Parliament, ZANU-P.F. holds 98, including 30 whose occupants are government-appointed and are not being contested. The M.D.C. has a bare 51 seats, down six from the last election. To gain control, the party would have to win an additional 25 seats — an impossibility, most here say.
The voter rolls are crucial — and contentious. A computerized study in January of 100,000 registered voters by the FreeZim Support Group, a pro-democracy organization, concluded that as many as 2 million of Zimbabwe’s 5.6 million registered voters are suspect. The group estimates that 800,000 voters are dead, 300,000 are listed more than once and more than 900,000 do not live at their recorded addresses.
Opposition efforts to challenge the lists have proved futile. David Coltart, an M.D.C. legislator from Bulawayo, dispatched supporters house-to-house last month to verify his region’s rolls. The police arrested them within hours, saying he needed permission for political gatherings. Armed with a court order, he re-deployed the team — and they were arrested again.
”The M.D.C. is just losing direction,” said Margaret, a jobless 28-year-old single mother of two in Bulawayo who once worked for the ZANU-P.F. ”ZANU-P.F. will regain three-quarters of the seats they lost” in the 2000 elections, she said.
One reason, she said, is Zimbabweans’ reverence for Mr. Mugabe, their liberator from white rule, widespread chaos notwithstanding. ”If your father rapes someone, you do not shun him,” she said. ”He’s still your father.” She refused to give her last name.
Yet among many Zimbabweans interviewed, the M.D.C. is seen as surging in popularity. Thousands have swarmed to rallies, even in rural areas long seen as government strongholds, and the government’s decision to allow open campaigning has emboldened ordinary people.
Burdened with sclerotic leaders and restless younger underlings, ZANU-P.F. also is not the well-oiled political machine it once was.
But if this election hinges on anything, many say, it may be food — or the lack of it. One year ago, Mr. Mugabe ordered the World Food Program to stop distributing most food aid, stating that Zimbabwe was self-sufficient.
In fact, outside experts agree, the opposite was true.
But by forcing the World Food Program to reduce food distribution, the government ensured that the hungry would look to the government for aid, often tied to support of government candidates.
The National Constitutional Assembly, a pro-democracy group, reported in February that food was used as a political tool in nearly three out of four districts it surveyed.
But the government has also courted a powerful backlash by failing to fill the vacuum it created by rejecting international food aid. As he stood at in the crowd at the Filabusi rally, Ngwenya, a 52-year-old farmer with seven children who would volunteer only his first name, agreed that this election is first and foremost about food. ”A people’s government must first see if people are eating,” he said.