Posted on 03/10/2002 6:01:13 AM PST by Clive
author/source:Sunday Telegraph (UK)
published:Sun 10-Mar-2002
posted on this site:Sun 10-Mar-2002
Article Type : News
Mugabe's mobs have turned their terror campaign on the opposition polling agents who are all that stand between the autocrat and another six-year term. Philip Sherwell reports from Zvimba South, the president's heartland
Jericho Ngonu and Francis Kufani are marked men. Last week, they were hauled from their homes in the middle of the night by Robert Mugabe's feared National Youth Brigade, beaten savagely with wire piping, then handed over to the police for a night in a fetid cell. Their crime was to have put their names forward as polling agents for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in Zvimba South, the birthplace of the Zimbabwean president. They were limping, bruised but still defiant when I met them in hiding on a farm north of Harare, shortly after they were released from jail. They insisted that the risk of further beatings - or worse - had not deterred them serving as MDC agents at polling stations yesterday - nor would it do so today.
Across the country, however, fewer than half the opposition election agents were able to man their posts, having been either beaten or chased away by Zanu PF mobs. Their absence left government officials with free rein to stuff ballot boxes, which could be the final body blow to MDC hopes of a landslide victory for their candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. The strategy is clear. Mugabe's thugs last week turned their terror campaign on opposition polling agents because they are on the front line of the battle against electoral fraud during this weekend's bitterly-fought presidential poll. Fewer than 500 local independent elections observers have been accredited by the government in Harare, while international teams such as the Commonwealth mission lack the numbers to monitor the whole country for the full two days of voting.
That means that at many polling stations, especially in remote rural areas, the only safeguard against rampant rigging is the presence of the two opposition party agents allowed at each site. Forty MDC agents were abducted on Friday morning and dozens more have been driven from their homes by recent violence. On Friday afternoon, however, convoys left towns and cities to deploy agents such as Ngonu and Kufani at the polling stations where they will spend the weekend. Nowhere was the intimidation and violence of last week more intense than in the Mugabe heartland of Zvimba South. The president's sister, Sabina, is the local Zanu PF party MP and the Robert Mugabe Highway, built by his friends the North Koreans, runs through the area to his country mansion 50 miles east of Harare.
It was here, on Tuesday afternoon, that MDC activists heard rumours that a reward of £15 (equivalent to a teacher's monthly salary) was being offered for the abduction of their election agents. Fewer than 12 hours later, shortly after midnight on Wednesday, a 30-strong Zanu PF youth brigade came looking for Ngonu, 32, and Kufani, 29, in the small farming community of Mount Hampden. The men were tied up as their wives watched in horror, then taken to a nearby vocational training institute that was recently converted into a militia base. There, along with three fellow polling agents, they were forced to the ground - with their assailants' feet holding them down by the neck, arms and legs - and whipped across the back and buttocks with pipes.
"They asked us why we wanted to sell our country out to the white people," recalled Ngonu. "We promised that we would support Zanu PF if they let us go, but they just handed us over to the police in the morning. We tried to tell the officers what had happened, but they just said that we deserved to be beaten because we had been spraying `Vote MDC' slogans." Despite their welts and cuts, Ngonu and Kufani were, by Zimbabwe's recent brutal standards, among the lucky ones. They were freed after South African election observers raised their case with police. Thirty-three people, nearly all MDC supporters, have died in political violence already this year, according to local human rights groups, and a new wave of violent land invasions by so-called war veterans has targeted white farmers who are backing the opposition. Ngonu and his friends were eventually released on Thursday after paying a fine of £1.25 for damaging property. The three South African observers, who had been alerted to their case by the MDC and were surrounded by youths when they went looking for the abducted men at the militia base, later confirmed their account.
The same youth brigade camp is being used as a polling station this weekend, adding to the intimidation of voters. Indeed, when MDC election agents turned up at the site on Friday evening, they were chased away by the Zanu mob which was still occupying the buildings. Similar stories of opposition election agents being targeted emerged across the country. Indeed, so many polling agents took refuge at the MDC headquarters in the second city of Bulawayo from isolated Matabeleland towns such as Lupane and Nkayi that they had to sleep rough in the yard behind the office. Despite the threats, however, these young opposition supporters risked their lives to return home and work as agents this weekend. "If we want to get rid of Mugabe and Zanu PF, then we have to accept the risks. It is our duty," said Nkosinesisa Mkwananzi, 25, a young mother from Lupane.
MDC strategists believe that if the backing for Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader who celebrates his 50th birthday today, is as high as the 70 per cent indicated in some early opinion polls, then Zanu-PF will be unable to fiddle the result to give another six-year term to Mugabe, the 78-year-old autocrat who has ruled the country since independence in 1980. It is against this backdrop that the MDC polling agents have such a crucial role this weekend as they monitor the vote and count for fraud. In an effort to ensure that they are not intimidated or targeted, especially in Zanu PF heartlands such as Zvimba, plans were finalised late last week for fellow MDC supporters to tour polling stations by car to ensure that their colleagues are safe.
The MDC says that it has learned from the experiences of the 2000 parliamentary vote, which it narrowly lost. "During those elections, MDC polling agents were often told in no uncertain terms by Zanu PF supporters that they should take a break for the sake of their health," said John Makumbe, a politics professor at the University of Zimbabwe. "Others were informed that they should go home because their wives were sick. Sometimes the wives really were sick; they had been assaulted."
Mugabe has drawn his own lessons from 2000, however. As well as unleashing the newly-trained youth brigades on the country to terrorise potential MDC voters, he has also resorted to a staggering array of tactics designed to manipulate the result before the ballots are even cast. In rural areas, the militia have told illiterate and terrified villagers that secret video cameras will record how they vote. In Zvimba South, Zanu PF thugs even turned the terror on local witchdoctors, murdering a 70-year- old spirit medium whom they accused of using magical powers to persuade village chiefs and elders to oppose Mugabe. Fellow witchdoctors last week compared his fate to that of two legendary mediums killed for opposing the colonial invasion of the 1890s and vowed wrath upon the attackers. "The perpetrators of this evil act will themselves never know peace," they declared.
Many MDC supporters have been wiped from the voters' roll by a series of recent legal rulings and controversial presidential orders issued by Mugabe himself. Tens of thousands of others will be unable to vote because they have been driven from their homes or had their identity cards confiscated by mobs. Zanu-PF, meanwhile, continued secretly to register voters until last Sunday, while some soldiers and police were ordered to cast their ballots in front of their officers in early voting last week. The state electoral commission was also placed under the control of senior military figures after the army high command said it would intervene to prevent Tsvangirai taking power. The confusion is so great that final details of polling station locations, numbers of ballot papers printed and voters lists had not been revealed by the end of Friday as last-ditch court challenges continued.
If Mugabe is declared the victor early this week, it will have been a textbook case of how to fix and steal an election. But if Tsvangirai ends his rival's 22-year grip on power, he will owe much to young Zimbabweans such as Jericho Ngonu and Francis Kufani in Zvimba South for risking their lives at polling stations this weekend.
Possibly also SADC and Commonwealth neighbours finally recognizing that the destruction of the Zim economy is working a grave injury on their own.
Bump for heroes.
In a country with a 2nd amendment, govt sponsored gangs of thugs trying to abduct or beat poll watchers would be shot down like criminal dogs.
This insane charade can only happen in a disarmed society.
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