African observers said the election was free and fair.

African observers say poll was free and fair

Chris McGreal in Harare and Ewen MacAskill
Thursday March 14, 2002
The Guardian

Britain and other western countries were left frustrated and impotent yesterday after Robert Mugabe formally declared that he had overwhelmingly won Zimbabwe's presidential election.
The extent to which Mr Mugabe outmanoeuvered the west was made clear yesterday when southern African countries issued a surprise statement declaring the conduct of the election free and fair.

The move is almost certain to scupper any hope of the Commonwealth suspending Zimbabwe next week.
At the weekend the European Union, prodded by Britain, is planning to extend the range of sanctions against Zimbabwe, targeting more members of the leadership. Earlier this year, the EU imposed a travel ban on Mr Mugabe and 19 members of his regime and froze their overseas assets.
But there were no illusions in Britain or elsewhere in Europe that the measures will have any real leverage in Harare.

The Zimbabwe registrar-general, Tobaiwa Mudede, declared that Mr Mugabe had won a fifth term in office after the results from all 120 constituencies were returned. He said Mr Mugabe had won 1,685,212 votes against 1,258,401 for challenger Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

"We foresaw electoral fraud but not daylight robbery," Mr Tsvangirai said. "We find ourselves unable to endorse the purported election of President Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe's president in this election. It's the biggest election fraud I've witnessed in my life."

The MDC leader said the onus was on "the people" to lead the way, whether passively or not. "We seek no confrontation with the state because that's what they want. But the people themselves have to decide what action to take," he said.

In the Harare townships where people stood in line for two days to vote in the belief that they were consigning Mr Mugabe to history, angry residents looked to Mr Tsvangirai to confront the government.

"We need Tsvangirai to tell Mugabe he cannot steal this election," said Noel Gukuta, a youthful MDC voter. "The soldiers have guns so we cannot fight him but we can make sure he cannot rule us. We must strike, we must march, we must show that we are not goats."

The country took the news of Mr Mugabe's victory with no great celebrations or protests.

The government, sensing murmurs about revolt, put the army on full alert, deployed troops in key townships and the police set up roadblocks on the main roads into Harare to stop and search vehicles for weapons.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who is to make a Commons statement today, said: "For months the government of Zimbabwe has conducted a systematic campaign of violence and intimidation, designed to achieve an outcome - power at all costs."

A senior state department official in Washington later said: "We're considering further steps, given all the things that happened before and during the elections."

Apart from the result, the main jolt yesterday was that election observers from South Africa, Nigeria and Namibia effectively endorsed the election. "It is our considered view that the election was free and fair and reflects the wishes of the people of Zimbabwe," Namibia's observer team said in a statement, adding that the poll was "watertight, without room for rigging".

The South African team described the election as "legitimate" while the Nigerian ob servers said they had seen nothing that threatened the integrity of the poll.

The Commonwealth trio to decide on action next week is made up of Australia, which will back suspension, the South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, and the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo. In Zimbabwe the leadership of the congress of trade unions is considering calling a two-day general strike to test whether there would be popular support for a longer protest, and various civil rights groups are meeting today to discuss mass civil disobedience.

The MDC's lawyers are also studying the possibility of legal action.

In the final results, Mr Mugabe made a net gain of votes compared with the 2000 parliamentary election in every province in the country. While there was evidence of vote tampering in some areas, most of the ballots dropped into the box with a cross by Mr Mugabe's name were not fraudulent. There has been no criticism of the count.

"This is a runaway victory," said the justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa. "It was won on the issue of the land."