Chris McGreal in Harare
President Robert Mugabe has put Zimbabwe’s army in charge of this weekend’s presidential election and vote count, compounding fears that his government’s campaign of intimidation will follow voters right up to the ballot box and that widespread vote tampering will be used to try to keep him in power.
Almost every aspect of the vote, including the handling of ballot boxes, is now in the hands of a retired army colonel, Sobusa Gula-Ndebele. Mugabe quietly appointed him head of the Electoral Supervisory Commission a few days after the military high command made its coup threat.
Gula-Ndebele has appointed Brigadier Douglas Nyikayaramba chief elections officer, the second most important post. The government says Nyikayaramba retired from the army a few weeks ago, but sources close to the commission say he is on leave.
In recent weeks soldiers have been appointed to all levels of the election process, including many as monitors who are supposed to act independently to ensure ballot boxes are not tampered with and to verify the count.
The electoral commission has also recruited “war veterans”, who have led the often violent invasions of farms and been instrumental in the campaign of terror against Mugabe’s opponents, and members of the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, to work alongside the soldiers.
The government refuses to reveal the names of the six members of the commission’s secretariat but they are known to include at least two other army officers.
“We’re very concerned about it,” said Reginald Matchaba-Hove, the chairperson of the Zimbabwe election support network, an independent organisation that used to work closely with the government’s electoral commission but is now excluded. “It’s totally unprecedented for the military to run and monitor an election.”
The military’s infiltration of the electoral process means that soldiers, war veterans and ruling party officials responsible for a two-year government campaign of violence will be inside almost every polling station. In some cases they will be “helping” voters to mark their ballots.
In addition to well-documented decisions such as banning potentially critical foreign election observers, Mugabe’s war of attrition against the vote has taken on several other forms:
The government has cut the number of polling stations in urban areas that firmly support the opposition, in the hope that long queues will discourage people from voting. It has increased balloting places in the countryside where Mugabe is more popular and rigging is easier.
Independent monitors and party election agents will no longer be able to travel in the same vehicles as ballot boxes transported to and from the polls, raising concerns that the boxes could easily be switched.
Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared from the voters’ roll, including many young people and most of the white population.
Tawanda Hondora, a human rights lawyer, says there is no doubt that the myriad attacks on the vote is coordinated toward one end getting Mugabe re-elected, however illegitimately. “Look at the high incidence of violence, look at the creation of the Zanu-PF youth militia and that the war veterans have not been arrested for violence. Look at the number of people who have been tortured, disappeared or whose homes have been destroyed. What else can you conclude?”
Yet Matchaba-Hove says the election is far from lost for the opposition. “We are starting off with a playing field that is uneven legally, logistically, politically and otherwise. But we are still telling people to vote, that the vote is secret and that it is important to go to the polls.”
See pages 14, 15, 21, 25