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African Leaders Press Mugabe
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"There is a single-minded determination to hold the elections," Masunungure said. "It's to restore . . . his damaged legitimacy. He wants to restore that at any cost."
In a letter to election officials Tuesday, Tsvangirai officially dropped out of the race, as he said on Sunday he would do. In the letter, he said the violence and arrests against opposition officials made campaigning nearly impossible and casting ballots dangerous.
"The violence, intimidation, death, destruction of property is just too much for anyone to dream of a free and fair election let alone expect our people to be able to freely and independently express to free themselves," Tsvangirai wrote.
His party, the Movement for Democratic Change, also sent out cellphone text messages Tuesday urging supporters to avoid the polls and, if forced to vote by ruling party members, to spoil the ballot rather than cast it for either candidate.
The situation in this landlocked former British colony, once among Africa's most envied nations for its bounteous agricultural output and top-notch public education system, seems to become both more severe and intractable with each passing week.
Tsvangirai's withdrawal ended the prospect, however unlikely, of an immediate departure of Mugabe and a coterie of military and security officials who have taken control of the nation.
Major international powers, however outraged by the recent wave of torture, beatings, arrests and killings, have few obvious tools for ejecting a ruling group that controls every important lever of power in Zimbabwean society.
In the three days since Tsvangirai announced his withdrawal from the election, many dozens of supporters have ended up in the hospital; the rural home of a top opposition official, Elias Mudzuri, was attacked by men in military uniforms on Tuesday.
Many Zimbabweans are hoping for decisive intervention from the Southern African Development Community, the region's most important intergovernmental group. Its members have grown increasingly critical of Mugabe -- once a nearly universally revered leader of African liberation -- since March 2007, when Tsvangirai was arrested and viciously beaten along with 50 other party activists.
"They are inching toward a more proactive resolution of the crisis," said Jonathon Moyo, a former information minister in Mugabe's government who is now an independent member of parliament loosely aligned with the opposition. "They can persuade the Zimbabwean government to take a certain course of action. They are the only ones who can do that."
