African Leaders Press Mugabe
Zimbabwe Ruler Rejects Calls to Cancel Runoff

Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

HARARE, Zimbabwe, June 24 -- Influential leaders in South Africa and Senegal on Tuesday joined the global condemnation of Zimbabwe's lethal political violence and called on President Robert Mugabe to cancel Friday's election on grounds it would not reflect the free will of voters.

At campaign stops Tuesday, Mugabe vowed to go forward with the runoff vote even though his only rival, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, has dropped out of the race at the demand of supporters terrorized by months of killings, beatings, arrests, torture and kidnappings.

As Jacob Zuma, the head of South Africa's ruling party, and Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade expressed rising concern, Mugabe mocked Tsvangirai's decision to boycott the vote and take refuge in the Dutch Embassy.

"He is frightened, frightened of the people," a visibly upbeat Mugabe said in Banket -- a town about 60 miles northwest of Harare, the capital -- where thousands had gathered, images broadcast on state television showed. "Seeking refuge? What for? . . . These are voters. They won't do you any harm."

Tsvangirai's withdrawal has intensified the criticism of Mugabe and his determination to cling to power after 28 years despite sharply declining popularity and an economy that has gone from terrible to cataclysmic in recent months. A single U.S. dollar is now worth 14 billion Zimbabwean dollars on the black market, pushing an ever-growing number of people into poverty and hunger.

As several regional leaders prepared to meet Wednesday in Swaziland for a summit on Zimbabwe, Zuma said the situation in the country was "out of control," according to news reports. His African National Congress issued a sharply worded statement calling for Friday's election to be canceled in favor of an urgent new round of negotiations between Mugabe and the opposition.

The statement went far beyond the comments made previously by South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has been widely criticized for treating Mugabe with excessive deference.

It accused the government of "riding roughshod" over the opposition. "The ugly incidents and scenes that have been visited on the people of Zimbabwe persuade us that a run-off Presidential election offers no solution to Zimbabwe's crisis," the statement said. "The very legitimacy of the run-off has already been severely compromised by the actions of both ZANU (PF) militants and those of state officials who do not even conceal their partiality in favor of the governing party." The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, is Mugabe's party.

The statement, issued a day after a tough U.N. Security Council statement about Zimbabwe, also rejected suggestions of outside intervention, saying that the Zimbabwean people must solve the crisis on their own. "Any attempts by outside players to impose regime change will merely deepen the crisis," it said, going on to list injustices of British colonial rule.

Senegalese President Wade, a respected elder of the continent, meanwhile, said in a statement that Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy after being tipped off that soldiers were on the way to his house. "He is only safe because, alerted by friends, he left in a hurry a few minutes earlier," Wade said.

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has also sharply criticized Mugabe and the pending vote.

Political analyst Eldred Masunungure said Mugabe will not heed calls, whether from within Zimbabwe or without, to delay the Friday vote. The first round was inconclusive, with Tsvangirai outpolling Mugabe but falling short of an absolute majority required for victory.

"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."