Mugabe Loses Parliament in Zimbabwe

A man repairing a bicycle tire sat next to torn posters of President Robert G. Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe on Wednesday. (Desmond Kwande/Agence France-Presse)

HARARE, Zimbabwe: Ap. 3rd. (NY Times) — President Robert Mugabe and his ruling party have lost control of the nation’s Parliament, election returns showed on Wednesday, giving new impetus to the bigger question: Does that foretell a loss of the presidency itself, the job he has held tightly for the past 28 years? As this nation waited in frustration a fourth day without official results in its presidential race, the main opposition party of Morgan Tsvangirai announced its own final tally, proclaiming victory with 50.3 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43.8 percent — just barely enough to avoid a runoff. Zimbabwe now waits to see if the official count matches the opposition’s, knowing it would not require a very heavy thumb on the scale to force another round of voting three weeks from now. There were signs that Mr. Mugabe has endorsed a second vote, which, while not as humiliating as an outright defeat, would still seem a difficult pill for a man who has held power for 28 years and considers himself the father of the nation. Wednesday morning’s edition of The Herald, the state-run newspaper, reported that “the pattern of results” shows that no candidates “will garner more than 50 percent of the vote, forcing a re-run.”

The newspaper, considered a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, published no actual election totals from Saturday’s vote and attributed its conclusion to analysts. But it likely means that ruling party insiders have urged the president not to give up his — and their — power, either convincing Mr. Mugabe to keep on fighting or at least to maintain the option. Even so, the election commission confirmed Wednesday that the balance of power had fatefully shifted in Parliament, long a bastion of support for Mr. Mugabe. With only 11 races to be declared, the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, had 106 seats in all, including one for an allied independent, in the 210-seat assembly. Mr. Mugabe’s party — known as ZANU-PF — had only 93 seats and among its losing candidates were seven of the president’s cabinet ministers.

But the presidency remains another matter. A businessman with close connections to the party hierarchy, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said the president had met Tuesday evening first with the chiefs of military and intelligence and then with key members of his cabinet and the party presidium. “They urged him to go to the bush,” the businessman said, meaning that in a runoff the party would employ tactics of intimidation and bloodshed that had worked well in earlier campaigns, especially in rural areas that can be closed off to opposition candidates. President Mugabe was said to hesitate. He is a once-lauded liberator and statesman who became a ruthless autocrat to be forever remembered for murderous campaigns against his enemies and an ill-conceived takeover of white-owned farmland that ended up wrecking the economy. He feels a strong sense of rejection in the election results and a part of him wants to concede, the businessman said. Still, Mr. Mugabe was urged to continue. If a runoff occurs, the opposition is ready, said the party’s secretary general Tendai Biti at the press conference where he released the results. “We’ll accept with protest, but it is only a delay of the inevitable.” He predicted the president would lose the rerun by “an embarrassing margin” and suggested that Mr. Mugabe withdraw with grace. Mr. Biti also demanded that the election commission finish its count in the presidential election, implying that something fishy was in the works. “There is a vacuum, and in a vacuum all sorts of mischief fills in,” he said. “Harare is bubbling with conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.” Mr. Biti said the election commission’s tallies for Parliament by and large coincided with his party’s, as they are both working off numbers that were posted at each polling station. The exception, he said, were discrepancies in the province of Mashonaland Central.

The delay in publishing the presidential results has brought international criticism. In Romania, where President Bush is attending a meeting of NATO leaders, a White House spokesman said Wednesday that the administration supported calls for Mr. Mugabe to accept the results of the election, suggesting that he should step aside, though stopping short of calling on him to do so. "It’s clear the people of Zimbabwe have voted for change," said the spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe. The mood among the opposition is buoyant. The results showed that it had won several seats in rural areas where President Mugabe had previously been enormously popular. Patrick Chitaka won a Senate seat for the first time in rural Nyanga-Mutasa in Manicaland province. “We’ll wipe Mugabe out,” he said at the prospect of a presidential runoff. “People are tired of being poor, and now that they know the bully can be thrashed they’ll come out in greater numbers than before. Even the oldest people with canes will come. “In 2000 and 2002, Mugabe had taken land from white people and could dangle that issue,” he added. “But now we have seen that he has not only destroyed commercial agriculture but subsistence farming. The only people who profited were bigwigs who looted.”

But a runoff, if it comes to that, would also create difficulties for the opposition. Civic groups and Mr. Tsvangirai’s party both deployed thousands of election observers around the country, guarding against chicanery at the polls and making sure that the votes were counted openly and the tallies posted in public view. It may be hard to recreate that effort, especially in an economically devastated nation where a huge deployment requires the use of scarce gasoline and a problematic mobile phone system. Then, too, the run-up to Saturday’s election was relatively free of the violence that characterized so many earlier campaigns. With his back to the wall, and with the support of military and police leaders, Mr. Mugabe might well unleash his desperation as rage, many here worried. “A lot of areas that traditionally voted for Mugabe this time went for Tsvangirai, and there will be recriminations against those people,” said Useni Sibanda, the national coordinator for the Zimbabwe Christian Alliance. If a runoff is set, the alliance plans to send delegations this week to South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania to ask the presidents of those countries to implore Mr. Mugabe to resign — or at the very least to send observers to monitor the election, Mr. Sibanda said.
By Barry Bearak with Steven Lee Myers reporting from Bucharest, Romania.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Mozlink