Secret Mugabe meeting ponders military move or fixed result!

[AriseSouthAfrica]

Secret Mugabe meeting ponders military move or fixed result - but not an admission of defeat

The Guardian
Tuesday April 1 2008

A crisis meeting of Robert Mugabe's security cabinet decided to block the opposition from taking power after what appears to have been a comprehensive victory in Zimbabwe's elections but was divided between using a military takeover to annul the vote and falsifying the results.

Diplomatic and Zimbabwean sources who heard first-hand accounts of the Joint Operations Command meeting of senior military and intelligence officers and top party officials on Sunday night said Mugabe favoured immediately declaring himself president again but was persuaded to use the country's electoral commission to keep the opposition from power.

The commission began releasing a trickle of results yesterday, more than 36 hours after the polls closed, but the opposition Movement for Democratic Change said it believed the count was being manipulated. Nonetheless, the first results, for 52 seats in the lower house of parliament, cost Mugabe one of his closest allies with the defeat of the justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, whom the MDC has accused of abusing the law to persecute the ruling Zanu-PF party's opponents.

Other cabinet ministers are also believed to have lost their seats. However, the few parliamentary results offered no guide to the outcome of the presidential race.

Independent monitors collating the count from polling booth returns say the MDC presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, won about 55% of the vote and Mugabe 38%. The MDC also gained control of both houses of parliament, according to the monitors.

The MDC said the slow pace of releasing vote tallies - likely to take days at the present rate - was further reason to suspect they were being tampered with. Sources with knowledge of the JOC meeting said the Zanu-PF leadership was "in shock" after it was informed of the scale of the victory of the MDC's presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai.

A senior diplomatic source who received accounts from two people privy to the JOC meeting said it discussed shutting down the count and Mugabe declaring himself re-elected or the army stepping in to declare martial law on the pretext of defending the country from instability caused by the opposition claiming victory.

 "In the JOC meeting there were two options for Mugabe: to declare victory on Sunday or declare martial law," said the diplomat. "They did not consider conceding. We understand Mugabe nearly decided to declare victory. Cooler heads prevailed. It was decided to use the [election commission] process of drip, drip where you release results over a long period, giving the opposition gains at first but as time wears on Zanu-PF pulls ahead."

Another source said that some JOC members favoured a less hardline approach by reaching out to the opposition but were overruled. If the government does attempt to fix the result it will not go unchallenged. The election commission will have to substantially alter a large number of polling booth returns in order to overturn Tsvangirai's significant lead. But the MDC has photographed results declarations pinned to the doors of more than 8,000 polling stations.

If the numbers announced by the election commission are different, the party says it will have indisputable evidence of fraud. "Unlike previous elections no one can privatise the result as it is posted outside the stations," said the MDC's secretary general, Tendai Biti. "This country stands on a precipice. We still express our great misgivings about [the election commission's] failure to announce the results.

It raises tension among the people that is fertilising an atmosphere of suspicion." The opposition is attempting to reach out to the military. A senior MDC source said Tsvangirai has approached the former army chief, Solomon Mujuru, to reassure the military that it has nothing to fear from a transition of power and to ask what its concerns are so they can be addressed.

Mujuru is widely respected in the military but is treated with suspicion by Mugabe and other Zanu-PF hardliners after being tied to the presidential campaign of Simba Makoni, the Zanu-PF dissident who has done poorly in the election.

Mujuru has yet to respond to Tsvangirai. International pressure on Mugabe to respect the result is growing. Britain has little influence over Zimbabwe but the foreign secretary, David Miliband, said he and Gordon Brown will be speaking to other African leaders about the situation.

They can be expected to urge South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, in particular to pressure Mugabe to recognise defeat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/01/zimbabwe

[AriseSouthAfrica]

Peter Godwin: The desperate throes of a master election-rigger

Independent, UK

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

As Zimbabwe's elections hang in the balance, it's instructive to look at
Robert Mugabe's master map of electoral manipulation. There are three
distinct stages to how he rigs the poll.

Stage one is the skewing of the democratic environment. He has always done
this. Even in the very first post-civil war elections in 1980, that brought
him to power with an overwhelming mandate. Instead of moving all his
guerrillas into assembly points, as agreed under the Lancaster House peace
deal, he instructed a large number to stay among the rural electorate and
warn them to vote for him, or else 'aluta continua' – the war continues.

Now Mugabe uses the traditional tribal chiefs to control the rural
electorate. He pays them large salaries and gives them luxury SUVs, on
condition they instruct their followers to vote for him. Mugabe also
increased the number of rural polling stations, ostensibly, to cut the
distance rural voters have to travel to cast their ballots, but actually, to
impose greater scrutiny on how they vote. That way, instead of there being
dozens of villages in the catchment Mugabe's men can now identify opposition
votes with particular villages and threaten them with dire consequences.

Those consequences often revolve around food: in Zimbabwe hunger is the
dictator's ally, it is easily manipulated. With so many rural Zimbabweans
dependent on food aid, Mugabe threatens to cut food deliveries from areas
that don't vote for his ruling Zanu-PF party (the government-run grain
marketing board has a monopoly on all grain deliveries.)

To ameliorate the effects of hyperinflation, now way over 100,000 per cent,
Mugabe gave teachers, soldiers, policemen and civil servants huge salary
increases, in the run up to these elections. For these elections he also
gerrymandered parliamentary constituencies, giving more seats to the
northern rural constituencies, his traditional bastion, and taking seats
away from the cities and from the south, both opposition strongholds. Mugabe
also used the police and the Central Intelligence Agency to harass and
intimidate the opposition, and he denied the opposition fair access to the
media – especially to radio and TV, which are already state-controlled.

Finally, for stage one, in the week before the election, the heads of the
security forces appeared on state media to tell the nation that none of them
would allow any candidate, other than Robert Mugabe, to rule Zimbabwe – in
effect, threatening a pre-emptive coup to keep Mugabe in power if he lost
the vote.

The second stage takes place at the ballot box itself. The voter's roles are
bloated with "ghost voters," thousands registered to a single shanty, or to
bogus addresses. Voters rolls weren't made freely available to the
opposition to check. Many legitimate voters (in known opposition areas)
found their names had been taken off the rolls, and were unable to vote. As
were the Zimbabweans in the growing diaspora, who are not allowed postal
votes. Almost 70 per cent of Zimbabweans between the ages of 18 and 60 now
live and work outside the country, most of whom support the opposition.

In the last two elections these two stages of rigging have been enough to
get the "right" result for Mugabe. But in last Saturday's poll, the swing
towards the opposition was so great that these tactics did not, by
themselves, prevail. And so the Zimbabwe Election Commission (run by a
former army officer and usually reliably pro-Mugabe) was faced with stage
three rigging.

Theoretically this is relatively simple. At the central counting station,
figures are massaged to give the desired outcome. But in these latest
elections, it wasn't so simple. For one thing, they were, for the first time
"harmonised" elections – four different elections in one. Voters filled in
ballots for parliament, senate and local wards, as well as president. And
what really hamstrung Mugabe this time, was a provision in the new electoral
laws that results (of all four counts) be posted on walls on the 9,000
polling stations.

In the past, when rigging stages one and two worked well, this wouldn't
really have mattered. But now suddenly it does. Opposition representatives
went around photographing the posted results, and collating them. Mugabe's
men were able to chase opposition observers away from polling stations in
his heartlands, and it is for these that Mugabe is able to manufacture
fictitious results, to swing the overall results of the presidential
contest. But the Mugabe machine is not what it was. The logistics are
creaking, and the once monolithic party is now faction-ridden and beset by
internal succession feuds, undermining its rigging operation, perhaps
fatally.

Peter Godwin is the author of 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun', on the
collapse of Zimbabwe