John Kadonhera (77) decided that, if he was going to die, he was not going to give his murderers the satisfaction of cooperating with them. A former police officer who defected from Zanu-PF to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), he said the militiamen who pointed him out ordered him to lie on the ground.
”I refused to lie down because I knew they would kill me, so they started beating my head with a wooden stick. They put me in a house they were using as their base. There were about 10 people in the room. When I tried to push my way out, that’s when they started beating me again,” he says.
Blood is still caked around the back of his head and right ear. His right arm and hand are so swollen that they strain the seams of his shirt. But he says he wants to get home to look after his four grandchildren, whose parents have died. And to vote.
Zimbabweans have not seen anything like this since the Matabeleland massacres by Mugabe’s army more than two decades ago. That violence was limited to the south. This time, as Mugabe (84) fights for his political life, it is nationwide. If this is the endgame for his regime, the brutality of the tactics employed reveal his determination to win at any cost.
There has been election violence before. Beatings, intimidation and sporadic killings were part of every ballot since the opposition emerged as a coherent force in 1999. But never before has it generated such widespread fear that even urban critics of the government have gone into hiding.
Euphoria gives way
Mugabe’s opponents are counting on desperation and anger overcoming fear at the ballot box this week. But, despite the courage of men such as John Kadonhera, it looks an increasingly forlorn prospect as Zimbabweans vote for the second time in three months in a contest that their country’s leader of 28 years says is not so much an election as a war.
The run-off presidential ballot on Friday is altogether a different affair from the first round of voting three months ago. There was popular excitement back then, a feeling that the ballot might finally bring change. But the euphoria when it fleetingly looked as if Mugabe had been toppled has given way to a grim calculation by many Zimbabweans over which is the worst option.
Do they dare to vote against Mugabe despite the threats of bloody retaliation, in the hope they might somehow be able to lever him out? Or do they resign themselves to more years of Zanu-PF misrule and plunder under a government with no policies to reverse 1,6-million percent inflation, prices now calculated in billions of Zimbabwe dollars, no jobs to speak of, and a currency that has lost half its value in the past week alone?
Mugabe believes he is in a life-and-death struggle. He made that clear again at a campaign rally on Friday, when he told his audience that only God could remove him from power. ”We will never allow an event like an election to reverse our independence, our sovereignty,” he said.
Were Zimbabweans able to make a free choice, Mugabe would almost certainly lose decisively to Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC candidate. The president has already lost once, taking only 43% of the vote to 48% for the MDC leader in the first round, despite the advantages of money and a massive propaganda campaign. The balance of the vote went to a third candidate whose support was strongly anti-Mugabe and can be expected to swing behind Tsvangirai.
Campaign of terror
A second defeat, it is increasingly clear, will not be allowed to happen. Zanu-PF has spent the past few weeks enforcing a military-led strategy that began with the beating of rural voters who deserted the ruling party and that evolved into a campaign of terror to purge swathes of the country of opposition activists, drive independent officials out of the election administration, replacing them with party lackeys and soldiers, and break Tsvangirai’s support in Harare and its townships.
More than 100 are dead, 200-plus abducted and missing, hundreds more jailed on spurious charges, thousands beaten and tens of thousands forced from their homes.
One group of doctors covertly helping the wounded says it has treated more than 2 500 victims, a figure far short of the real number of those attacked. With roadblocks dotted on all the main roads and surrounding major towns, the army and police are stopping ambulances from carrying people to hospitals.
Human rights lawyers have been intimidated — sometimes killed — to keep them from defending opposition officials jailed on trumped-up charges. Independent groups, from doctors helping victims of the terror to poll watchers, have been driven underground.
The MDC has found it all but impossible to campaign, with its activists locked up or in hiding. Tsvangirai’s campaigning has been curtailed at almost every turn. He is obliged to file notice of his rallies with the police, who promptly inform Zanu-PF, which dispatches thugs to break up the meetings. Tsvangirai often does not get to them in any case because he is sitting at a police roadblock in his car — his campaign buses were confiscated — for hours.
‘Voting for war’
The brutal strategy, inevitably, is paying off.
”It’s a very big problem,” says Lynette Karenyi, an opposition MP who was forced to flee her constituency in Chimanimani West because of Zanu-PF attacks.
”In some areas, I think it is working. They are telling our polling agents that, if they go and monitor the count, they will kill them. They are saying that if you vote for Morgan Tsvangirai, you are voting for war. We are saying to people that this is just political propaganda.”
But is it?
”It’s not. The threat is real. I’m not going to lie to you. There is no way I can give people security. Where am I going to get security from? How are we to protect them? If they have to vote Zanu-PF to survive, then …”
Edmond, a teacher from a school in Muzokomba in Buhera South, has certainly got the message from Zanu-PF. He was an independent election official in the March vote, but after he was dragged out of his bed and beaten up, he decided to pull out. Teachers are particularly distrusted by Zanu-PF because they are trusted by the communities they live in.
”No one is willing to be a polling officer this time. It’s better for me just to cast my vote and go home. It’s less trouble,” he says. ”It’s fear. People are afraid of Zanu-PF. They want to be safe, so they pretend to be Zanu-PF.”
More than 20 of the 63 teachers at Edmond’s school were forced to flee last week after Zanu-PF called the villagers to a rally. Another of them is Elijah.
”There is nothing people in Zimbabwe can do to stop Zanu-PF from doing what it wants. People are so afraid they may not turn out to vote, or will vote Zanu-PF. Almost every day, they have a rally from morning to sunset where they are threatened. People are threatened that, if they vote for Tsvangirai, there will be war. People are saying it’s better to have Mugabe so there will not be war,” he says.
”If Zanu-PF wins, we will not be able to stay in Zimbabwe. The only solution is to leave, because they are going to finish off the MDC.”
Zanu-PF’s violent militia has taken control of the townships around Harare and even moved into some of the capital’s upmarket suburbs, forcing the maids and gardeners to late-night meetings where they are threatened, sometimes beaten.
Provoking a response
The MDC’s national election director, Ian Makone, says: ”There’s the terror to stop people from voting, but I think they are also hoping to provoke a violent response from the MDC to justify a state of emergency or scrapping the election if they think they are still going to lose.”
There has been retaliation by some MDC supporters, who have killed war veterans, but it is not on the scale of Zanu-PF violence. Nevertheless, the state-run press has used it to try to portray the opposition as responsible for the killings and attacks at the behest of a British government trying to sow chaos.
The state media no longer even bother to talk about Tsvangirai other than to deride him. Every few minutes during the news, an advertisement pops up that shows Tony Blair morphing into George Bush and then Gordon Brown and finally Tsvangirai. The commentary says they are all losers, but the underlying message is that the MDC leader is a puppet of Western imperialism.
The government is trying to keep prying eyes away from its conduct of the poll. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a respected local poll monitoring organisation, dispatched 8 800 observers to check on the March vote. This time, the government has said it will permit the network only 500 monitors to oversee more than 9 000 polling stations.
”It’s not hard to see why they want to do that,” says Noel Kututwa, the network’s chairperson. ”The fact is, we won’t be everywhere like we were before and so they will hope they can get away with more. We’ll concentrate on the hot spots, if we can get in to them.
”They’ve intimidated our local observers, so we’ll have to bring them in from Harare. Access will be a problem. It’s not going to be a free and fair election. The will of the people won’t be respected. It’s a foregone conclusion what’s going to happen. Ordinary citizens have been terrorised to the extent that they won’t vote or they will be afraid to vote for the opposition.”
So why participate?
”The point is Zimbabweans still have the right to choose their leaders, to determine the destiny of the country,” Kututwa says.
Election challenge
The MDC’s Makone admits he faces an enormous challenge in the face of Zanu-PF’s campaign.
”We thought the March election was difficult to plan, but by comparison it was a piece of cake, because we had relative peace. We had 54 000 polling agents, six at each station. We could recruit locally,” he says. ”This time, possibly half the country has been terrified. We have to ship party agents from Harare into these areas.
”We are going to be beaten, there are going to be deaths, but we have to try to minimise it. The first challenge is to find the people to go to the polling stations as election agents, and then to get them there. The risks involved are enormous.”
Transport is a problem. Supporters are reluctant to lend their vehicles to transport election agents when cars are being burned. With the violence escalating, Tsvangirai is under pressure from regional leaders, including South African President Thabo Mbeki, to agree to call off the election, but there are many in the MDC who believe that would just allow Mugabe to perpetuate his rule.
Makone says there should be an election, even in such difficult conditions, because it will mark a watershed. He says that, even if Mugabe is declared the winner, he will no longer be accepted as the country’s legitimate president, either by Zimbabweans or their neighbours.
He may be right. Although Mbeki has protected Mugabe until now, and regional election observers have shied away from condemning previous votes in Zimbabwe as flawed, there is growing revulsion at what is happening.
A group of South African generals sent to assess the violence has told Mbeki squarely that Mugabe and Zanu-PF are to blame. Marwick Khumalo, the head of an African parliamentarians’ observer mission in Zimbabwe, says he has received ”horrendous stories” of political violence and will not endorse the election if it continues. Some African governments, including Tanzania and Kenya, have said there is no hope of a fair election.
The MDC is bracing itself to lose the count when the results come in, but is hoping that Mugabe has overplayed his hand and that Friday’s election will finally sweep away any lingering illusions about the legitimacy of his rule. For John Kadonhera, those illusions disappeared long ago. — guardian.co.uk