Mercedes Sayagues
In a last, desperate move to win the election, Zanu-PF militia are confiscating identity documents from villagers and farm workers across the country.
ID documents are needed to vote. A replacement costs Z$250, or three days of work.
At Shaka farm in Wedza, militia collected all ID documents, as well as Z$16 a head for Zanu-PF party cards. The Commercial Farmers Union has warned that such theft is on the increase.
The seizure of the ID documents comes after a spate of clashes between the government and election monitors.
First, the government barred election observers from Britain, as well as 10 Kenyans and seven Nigerians – branded “disgraceful Africans” – who had been sponsored by Britain.
Now it has barred 216 more observers – from the United States, from foreign NGOs such as the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Oxfam Canada, from the newly formed Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Electoral Commissions Forum and from the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Foreign observers with the Zimbabwe Council of Churches and the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice – a contingent which includes 19 South Africans – SADC diplomats and embassy staff based in Harare will also not be accredited as observers. Nor will staff from local NGOs.
Mugabe is banking on “friendly” Organisation of African Unity and governmental observers. As the state- owned The Herald wrote in an editorial this week: “African election observers are generally expected to be more open- minded when monitoring elections in Africa … We do not expect our own brothers and sisters to be aiding Western powers in their destructive ways.”
The registrar general keeps changing the goalposts for local poll monitors. After the referendum in February, civil society groups trained more than 15 000 poll agents and monitors. Last week, they were told to go for retraining with the registrar general’s office.
Eighty-five Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) monitors from the Mberengwa district went to Gweru last Sunday for training, only to be told they had been given the wrong date. The trip cost the MDC Z$15 000.
Only one monitor per party will be allowed in the polling booths. This rule will exclude thousands of monitors from human rights groups, churches and grass roots groups. They were efficient watchdogs in the referendum, sleeping with the ballot boxes until the counting was over.
People must vote in the constituencies where they are registered. Many of the 13 000 internally displaced people, however, cannot return to the constituency they fled after beatings, rape, torture and the burning of their homes and shops.
Among 60 refugees in a safe house in Zvishvavane are 30 trained poll monitors from Mataga. If they return, they risk being abducted at militia-manned roadblocks and tortured.
War veterans have vowed to be in the polling booths as Zanu-PF monitors. Just seeing them will intimidate their victims.