President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe at an election rally in Banket on Tuesday. (European Pressphoto Agency)In what seemed a clear rebuke to the efforts of Western nations to take an aggressive stance against the Zimbabwean government, the A.N.C. included a lengthy criticism of the “arbitrary, capricious power” exerted by Africa’s former colonial masters and cited the subsequent struggle by African nations to grant newfound freedoms and rights. “No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of ‘Rhodesia’ ever demonstrated any respect for these principles,” the A.N.C. said, referring to Zimbabwe before its independence. Still, the statement’s blatant castigation of Zimbabwe’s government reflected the increasing frustration with the nation’s strongman president, Robert Mugabe. Amid the international outcry over his government’s handling of the crisis, Mr. Mugabe was reported Tuesday as hinting that he might be open to talks with the beleaguered opposition, but only after he won the election. His longtime rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from a runoff scheduled for Friday because of the widespread violence and intimidation facing his party and its supporters. Mr. Mugabe was quoted on Tuesday as insisting that the ballot would proceed as he has planned. But in a speech in western Zimbabwe, Reuters reported, Mr. Mugabe referred to comments by Mr. Tsvangirai offering talks if the violence ended. “He now says he wants to negotiate,” Mr. Mugabe was quoted as saying. “We say we won’t refuse to negotiate but for now there is only one thing for us to accomplish.” His remarks were the most explicit affirmation that he intends to go through with an election condemned as flawed and illegitimate from a growing roster of organizations, politicians and governments from the UN to South Africa. But the hint of readiness to talk was also the first indication that Mr. Mugabe might negotiate — as South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki has been urging him to — once he has secured what he could depict as a position of strength. Mr. Tsvangirai has been badly weakened by the widespread attacks on his top officials and foot soldiers alike, and has been taking refuge at the Dutch Embassy in the capital, Harare. On Tuesday, he said he would leave his temporary sanctuary there within 48 hours following moves by Dutch authorities to assure his safety.
The A.N.C. statement was not signed by any individual in the A.N.C. and seemed to represent a marked departure from Mr. Mbeki’s refusal to castigate Mr. Mugabe. The A.N.C statement was the first official response from South Africa since Mr. Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from Friday’s planned runoff and the Security Council’s conclusion late Monday that it would be “impossible for a free and fair election to take place” in Zimbabwe. The country, once one of Africa’s most prosperous, has been reeling from a widening campaign of violence and intimidation ever since Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president for nearly 30 years, came in second in the initial round of voting on March 29. In a radio interview on Tuesday, Mr. Tsvangirai said that the Security Council statement blamed the violence on Mr. Mugabe’s leadership. “I think it’s a very important resolution,” he told Dutch public broadcaster Radio 1. “It recognizes the people who are accountable for the violence, and it squarely placed that responsibility at Mugabe’s leadership. I am sure that he can no longer remain defiant to that international position.” Mr. Tsvangirai reiterated his decision to boycott the vote on Friday. “It’s ridiculous to go into an election of that kind,” he said. “It’s a one-man competition.” His spokesman, George Sibotshiwe, said Tuesday that Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the embassy after learning that soldiers were converging on his home, The Associated Press reported. “The moment you have soldiers coming your way, you just run for your life,” Mr. Sibotshiwe said. “The only way he can protect himself is to go to an embassy.” Dutch officials said Mr. Tsvangirai had not requested political asylum. Mr. Sibotshiwe, Mr. Tsvangirai’s closest aide, himself fled to South Africa on Monday as the police raided the opposition party headquarters, rounding up dozens of people, including women, children and those injured in recent political violence. Mr. Sibotshiwe arrived in Johannesburg, and in an interview shortly afterward said he saw four men armed with pistols approaching the door of his safe house on Sunday morning and only narrowly escaped capture.
On Monday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, sharply condemned the violence seizing the impoverished nation and took the unusual step of calling for the runoff to be postponed, saying a vote under the current conditions “would lack all legitimacy.” “It will only deepen divisions within the country and produce a result that cannot be credible,” Mr. Ban said of the runoff, adding that he had spoken with “a number of African leaders” and found a consensus that it would be wrong to proceed with the vote. “There has been too much violence, too much intimidation,” he said. The statement from the Security Council went through several drafts before it won the required unanimous acceptance of all 15 members. Britain led an effort, dominated by the West, to include the toughest language, while South Africa and allies including China and Russia pushed to dilute it somewhat.
Mr. Mugabe, however, has shown disdain for international criticism, so it remained unclear whether the Security Council’s statement would carry more weight in prompting his government to relax its oppressive measures than any previous condemnations from foreign leaders. Boniface G. Chidyausiku, the United Nations ambassador from Zimbabwe, said that neither the statement from the Council nor the call by Mr. Ban to postpone the vote would affect the timing of the elections. “The Security Council cannot micromanage elections in any particular country,” Mr. Chidyausiku told reporters. “As far as we are concerned, the date has been set.” He accused Britain and its allies of pushing for “regime change” and said Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to drop out of the election was a ploy to attract international sympathy. He also said the opposition in Zimbabwe was exaggerating the violence. “These are M.D.C. tricks that should be seen for what they are,” he said in a speech, referring to the Movement for Democratic Change. “The British government’s hidden hand in all these political developments is evident and clearly visible.” Sir John Sawers, the British ambassador to the United Nations, expressed astonishment that Zimbabwe could so readily dismiss the opinion of the Council. “I find that incredible,” he told reporters. “The actions of this regime are unpredictable, and they will pursue only those courses of action which are in their own self-serving interests.”
Mr. Mugabe may also face increasing pressure from his fellow heads of state in southern Africa. Foreign ministers from a regional bloc of 14 nations known as the Southern African Development Community met on Monday in Angola to discuss the crisis. But the nations in the region have long been divided on the matter, and it is far from clear they will find enough common ground to act decisively. The president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, chosen by the 14-nation bloc as mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, has long maintained a strategy of quiet diplomacy, pushing for negotiations between Zimbabwe’s opposition and ruling parties, without criticizing Mr. Mugabe publicly. In a significant show of support for Mr. Tsvangirai, however, the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions declared on Tuesday that it was “appalled at the levels of violence and intimidation being inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by the illegitimate Mugabe regime.” “The June 27 presidential election is not an election, but a declaration of war against the people of Zimbabwe by the ruling party,” the union group added. Urging a blockade of Zimbabwe, it said, “We call on all our unions and those everywhere else in the world to make sure that they never ever serve Mugabe anywhere, including at airports, restaurants, shops, etc. Further we call on all workers and citizens of the world never to allow Mugabe to set foot in their countries.” Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia have also harshly condemned the repeated detention of Zimbabwean opposition leaders during the campaign, as well as the violence against opposition supporters. South Africa had resisted efforts to bring Zimbabwe’s political woes before the Security Council, contending that they were a domestic matter, not an international one. On Monday, the wrangling over the Council statement took most of the day. Opponents of a tougher stance by the Council succeeded in quashing an attempt to say that without a second round of elections, Zimbabwe should rely on the results of the first round in March. In that election, Mr. Tsvangirai won more votes than Mr. Mugabe, but, according to the official government count, less than the majority needed to avoid a runoff. Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in an interview on Monday that adding a mediator whom Mr. Tsvangirai trusts would be helpful, but she said that Mr. Mugabe had voiced no interest in talks. “It’s going to require an international push to prevent a civil war,” she said.
By Alan Cowell and Celia W. Dugger
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Officials said they found no survivors apart from four passengers rescued earlier in the day. Officials said the bodies of four passengers had also been recovered earlier in the day. Nanette Tansingco, mayor of San Fernando, Sibuyan’s largest town, told DZMM radio on Sunday that witnesses had described “the boat upside down with a big hole in the hull.” She said island villagers had reported seeing slippers and other belongings washing ashore, and other witnesses offered similar accounts. One of the survivors, Jesus Gica, told a radio station that he saw passengers losing consciousness and children unable to wear their life vests. “Many of us jumped from the ship,” he said. “The waves were big.” He also said elderly people, unable to escape, had been trapped underneath the sunken ferry.
Dozens of relatives of the passengers went to the ferry company’s office in Manila, demanding to know what happened to their loved ones. “I’m very worried,” Felino Farionin told The Associated Press. “I need to know what happened to my family.” He said his wife, son and in-laws were on the ferry. According to the government, the ferry was carrying 702 passengers, 45 of them children and infants, and 121 crew members.
The typhoon, Fengshen, made landfall on Saturday and battered several provinces. Its wind and rain knocked down power lines in the capital and elsewhere, caused landslides and capsized small boats. Fengshen, its winds at more than 90 miles per hour, caused more destruction in the northern Philippines but was headed out of the country on Sunday afternoon, weather officials said. The bad weather hampered efforts to locate the Princess of the Stars and its passengers, coast guard officials said. “They haven’t seen anyone,” Lt. Senior Grade Arman Balilo, a spokesman for the coast guard, told The Associated Press. “They’re scouring the area. They’re studying the direction of the waves to determine where survivors may have drifted.” Officials were checking reports that some people reached a nearby island and that a raft was spotted off another, said a coast guard spokesman, Cmdr. Antonio Cuasito, The Associated Press reported. “We can only pray that there are many survivors so we can reduce the number of casualties,” he said.
President Gloria Arroyo, who is in the United States for a state visit, scolded coast guard officials during a teleconference on Sunday for allowing the ferry to sail despite warnings about the typhoon. She ordered government agencies to coordinate rescue and relief efforts. The coast guard said the Princess of the Stars was allowed to leave Manila on Friday evening for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, because the storm had not yet made landfall. Coast guard officials said the ferry should have been big enough to sail and that a warning issued earlier on Saturday barred only small boats from traveling. In Iloilo Province, in the central Philippines, the governor, Neil Tupaz, reported that 59 people had died and that more than two dozen others were missing. “Iloilo is like an ocean,” Mr. Tupaz said in a radio interview. Officials said tens of thousands of displaced residents were moved to evacuation centers. Flights were canceled and Monday classes suspended. Each year, about 20 typhoons slam into the Philippines, an archipelago bordering the Pacitic in the path of the storm systems.
By CARLOS CONDE
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Over the past week, a growing chorus of leaders in Africa and abroad have declared unequivocally that a free and fair election is now impossible in Zimbabwe. There are growing cracks in the longtime solidarity of African leaders with Mr. Mugabe, a liberation hero whose defiant anti-western rhetoric for years struck a chord in the region, but it remains to be seen whether Zimbabwe’s neighbors will censure Mr. Mugabe or take even tougher steps, such as economic sanctions, to isolate his regime. They have never done so before despite elections in 2002 and 2005 that were widely believed to have been marked by rigging and fraud, but that his peers in southern Africa declared legitimate.
The United States and Britain are pressing to have Zimbabwe’s political crisis debated on Monday in the UN Security Council, a step South Africa, the southern African region’s most powerful nation, has consistently opposed. But Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has made it difficult for his fellow African heads of state to pretend there is anything normal about this election. He has repeated declared at public rallies in recent days that he would never allow Mr. Tsvangirai, whom he denounces as a pawn of Britain, the former colonial power in Zimbabwe, to become president through the ballot box, vowing that the bullet is mightier than the ballpoint pen. “Only God who appointed me will remove me — not the M.D.C., not the British,” Mr. Mugabe vowed in the city of Bulawayo on Friday. “Only God will remove me!”
Mr. Tsvangirai beat Mr. Mugabe in the March general election by 48 percent to 43 percent, even by the government’s own official count. The opposition claimed it won outright and that no runoff was needed. The Movement for Democratic Change has a history of agonizing about whether to participate in elections it believes will be fundamentally unfair, and there have long been deep divisions within the party about how to proceed. This year, Mr. Tsvangirai reluctantly entered the race, though he argued that the regional mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, had failed to ensure conditions for a fair contest. Mr. Tsvangirai said earlier this year that at least the election would reveal the ugly face of Mr. Mugabe’s despotic reign. Again, the opposition vacillated about whether to participate in the runoff, but finally decided to do so. In a decision that will certainly provoke a range of feelings in his supporters, many of whom have paid a terrible price for backing his candidacy, Mr. Tsvangirai apparently reached a point where the levels of violence were more than he was willing to see inflicted on his supporters. It is also possible that he and his advisers concluded the systematic campaign to displace thousands of the opposition’s polling agents and intimidate its supporters had succeeded in making victory virtually impossible.
Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic former trade union leader who has been Mr. Mugabe’s hated rival for almost a decade, charged on Sunday that Mr. Mugabe’s violent, retributive strategy had displaced 200,000 people, destroyed 20,000 homes and injured and maimed over 10,000 people in what he called in a statement “this orgy of violence.” The opposition party also issued a statement alleging that the high profile show of soldiers and police on Sunday showed, “Zimbabwe clearly is under military rule.” It described military helicopters flying over Harare and Bulawayo, the country’s largest cities, police officers in riot gear manning the grounds where Mr. Tsvangirai’s rally was supposed to have taken place, and ruling party youth militia stoning cars in Harare’s suburbs. Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to leave the race with only days to the finish line ends an election year that seemed after the March general election to offer Zimbabwe its first real hope of change since Mr. Mugabe rose to power in 1980. For a moment, Mr. Mugabe considered relinquishing power, governing party insiders said. But by April, Mr. Mugabe and a clique of military, police and intelligence officials — the so-called “securocrats” — had decided to carry out a violent strategy to hang onto power.
By Celia W. Dugger & Barry Bearak
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An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them...
“A fight is going on inside me... it is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.
The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.
This same fight is going on inside you and every other person, too.”
They thought about this for a minute, and then one child asked his grandfather... “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied... “The one you feed.”
