Opposition Says Mugabe Is Resorting to Violence

HARARE, Zimbabwe, April 8 -- Opposition officials accused President Robert Mugabe on Tuesday of deploying ruling party supporters to beat and intimidate opponents as his government prepared for a second and decisive round of voting in the presidential election.

The attacks, which opposition officials detailed in a three-page document distributed at a news conference, were part of what they characterize as a broad assault on both the opposition and the institutions of democracy.

With most journalists and international observers long gone since the March 29 vote, police, soldiers and youth militias are increasingly visible across Zimbabwe, evoking painful memories of past elections in which political violence was a routine tactic for Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Party officials denied Tuesday that they were resorting to violence.

Meanwhile, veterans of the nation's 1970s liberation war continued their invasions of Zimbabwe's few remaining white-owned farms. And seven officials from the electoral commission -- which Mugabe's government appoints and is widely presumed to control -- are battling criminal charges for allegedly rigging results in favor of the opposition.

Ruling party and opposition officials agree that Morgan Tsvangirai got more votes than Mugabe, but they disagree on the margin. The ruling party disputes Tsvangirai's assertion that he won more than 50 percent of the vote, which would give him an outright win in the first round.

After Mugabe's loss, ruling party officials vowed to "purge" the commission before a second round of voting. Opposition officials allege that election officials have been threatened into making phony confessions as part of Mugabe's bid to alter results.

As Mugabe continues to assert control, opposition leaders have struggled to craft an effective strategy for contesting a second round of voting they contend will be far more violent, and far more brazenly manipulated, than the first.

They are privately discussing whether to boycott a runoff and have called publicly for international assistance from the African Union or the southern African regional group. Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was in South Africa for a second day Tuesday, meeting government officials and senior members of the African National Congress in a quest for help against Mugabe.

Didymus Mutasa, Mugabe's security minister, said of Tsvangirai's efforts: "Why doesn't he talk to us? The problem is in Zimbabwe."

But Tendai Biti, secretary general of Tsvangirai's party, described the situation in Zimbabwe as "a constitutional and legal crisis," the Reuters news service reported. "I say to my brothers and sisters across the continent: Don't wait for dead bodies in the streets of Harare," Biti said.

As the pace of regional diplomacy quickened, the opposition continued its court battle to have results of the presidential election released. Paper results were posted in most of the country's 9,000 polling stations in the first 24 hours after the vote. Ten days after the balloting, the electoral commission has released all of the results for the lower house of parliament and the Senate, but it has not announced the presidential results, heightening fears that the numbers are being quietly changed to benefit Mugabe.

The delay, analysts say, is part of the ruling party's strategy for pushing back the date of an eventual runoff to allow it to regroup. Electoral law requires that a runoff be held within 21 days of the first election.

The opposition's legal battle to force the release of the results ground along slowly as a court ruled that the matter was urgent, then delayed a final decision by at least one more day.