Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 28, 2008
HARARE, Zimbabwe, June 27 -- President Robert Mugabe's militias drove a frightened electorate to the polls Friday, checking off names of voters and threatening vengeance on those who failed to cast ballots for the only man ever to rule Zimbabwe.
Voters said ruling party officials forced them to register their names, addresses and national identification numbers before entering polling stations. On leaving, they were told to report the last three digits of their ballot's serial number so their choice could be monitored. To make the job easier, Mugabe's party set up makeshift command centers near many polling stations.
"We have been warned that we will lose our house if we don't vote for" Mugabe, said Spencer Mashonga, 25, whose parents live in subsidized government housing. "So we just have to vote. It's not like we want to vote."
Cecil Zhangazha, 47, a liberation war veteran and a polling agent for Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, known by its acronym ZANU-PF, stood near the entrance of a polling station in rural Dema and greeted voters with a list of those expected to cast ballots for Mugabe.
"We've been educating people," Zhangazha said. "We believe they are all going to vote for ZANU-PF. That we have made sure of."
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe in the March 29 presidential election but narrowly missed an absolute majority, setting up the runoff. Mugabe's party also lost control of parliament in the initial vote but had rallied for Friday's vote by deploying a systematic campaign of violence never before seen in a Zimbabwean election.
Many Zimbabweans awoke Friday to the sounds of ruling party youths marching through the streets of their neighborhoods, singing songs about Mugabe and demanding that voters turn out even though Tsvangirai had dropped out of the race Sunday amid the campaign violence, which has left his party shattered. Tsvangirai has spent most of his time since then in the Dutch Embassy, afraid of arrest, assault or worse.
Despite the pressure, Zimbabweans at more than a dozen polling stations in Harare, the capital, and surrounding areas showed little interest in voting. Lines were rarely more than a few people long throughout the day. Police and soldiers were far more plentiful, inside and outside the polling stations. Local election officers rebuffed questions about turnout, though national officials claimed it was high.
The death toll over the past three months has exceeded 80, with tens of thousands of others wounded or driven from their homes. Entire families have been brutalized -- shot, whipped, poisoned, beaten with iron bars and forced to publicly renounce their political views.
The violence has generated an international outcry, including uncommonly harsh rebukes from Mugabe's fellow African leaders. The crisis is expected to be a major topic of discussion at a meeting of the African Union in Egypt next week.
The U.N. Security Council issued a statement Friday saying it was a "matter of deep regret that elections went ahead in these circumstances." But South Africa, whose president, Thabo Mbeki, has been reluctant to criticize Mugabe, derailed a U.S. and British effort to have the election declared illegitimate.
Following the meeting, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said he has begun discussions with select council members on a resolution that would impose unspecified sanctions on Zimbabwe if it continued to flout international calls for restraint.
Yet in Zimbabwe, voters have lost hope that Mugabe, even at age 84 and struggling to manage the country's catastrophic economic collapse, can be removed. Many people spent election day scrambling to merely survive amid the widespread expectation that attacks will continue against those who failed to vote for Mugabe, as demanded by party enforcers who included young thugs, veterans of the 1970s liberation war and government military and security officials.
"What is happening today is not an election. It is an exercise in mass intimidation," Tsvangirai said at a news conference Friday.
The goals for other opposition activists on this day were painfully modest: warm blankets, a bit of food, some clothes, a decent funeral for their fallen colleagues. Above all, they longed to survive an onslaught many believe is aimed at nothing less than their obliteration.
In Chitungwiza, a dense bedroom community 18 miles south of Harare, dozens of opposition activists spent Friday huddled in a wrecked home infused with mourning and fear.
The mourning was for four of their compatriots killed June 17 in an attack on the home, which had been a haven for opposition activists. The fear was for what might come now that they had refused to vote. The ruling party youths who patrolled the streets here had warned that those who failed to cast ballots -- and couldn't show red ink on their pinkies, a mark applied at polling stations to prevent double-voting -- would be beaten or killed.
At midafternoon, Question Dingo, 33, a leader among the opposition activists, appeared to solve the problem by fishing out one of the bright red cards that they once waved at political rallies to signal their expectation that Mugabe, like a misbehaving soccer player, would soon be ejected from Zimbabwean politics. Dingo said he tore up the card, soaked the pieces in a bowl of water and dipped his left pinkie in the inky paste he had made. The stain it left was enough, he hoped, to allow him to survive.
"If they come," Dingo said, "I can just raise my finger."
He passed the bowl around to the dozens of activists who had taken refuge in the home in recent weeks. After the attack, in which ruling party youths battered down a concrete perimeter wall, firebombed a bedroom and looted the house, the activists moved back in because they had nowhere else to go. More than 30 now live there, with women and children sleeping on the floor inside, men sleeping on the ground outside in the Southern Hemisphere's cold winter nights.
"There are so many boys buried in Warren Hills Cemetery, killed by Mugabe," said Georgina Nyamutsamba, 57, gesturing to a nearby burial site. "Please help us. There are so many of us suffering in Zimbabwe. What can we do?"
She, too, had red ink on her pinkie, courtesy of Dingo's bowl. The only ones who refused were the owners of the house, Phillimon and Annastasia Chipiyo, whose gregarious, 28-year-old son was one of the four killed in the June 17 attack.
"I have nothing to fear," Annastasia Chipiyo said. "I've just lost my son."
Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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