Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader announced on Tuesday he will boycott presidential elections scheduled for next year unless the poll is carried out under a new democratic constitution that ensures they are free and fair.
Morgan Tsvangirai, addressing mourners at a memorial service for an opposition activist shot dead by police on March 11, said a free election was the constitutional and democratic right of Zimbabweans.
About 800 mourners, including opposition leaders wearing bandages and other signs of injuries sustained in clashes with police, sang traditional dirges and gospel songs and waved the opposition’s symbolic open hand salute at a church in northern Harare.
”We will never go into an election that is predetermined,” Tsvangirai said, vowing to continue anti-government protests.
The opposition accuses President Robert Mugabe of rigging all elections since 2000 with the help of electoral laws and constitutional provisions favouring his party. Mugabe (83) is seen as unlikely to adopt a reformed constitution before polling, provisionally slated for next March.
Zimbabwe’s long-time ruler, meanwhile, was to attend a hastily called regional meeting on politics and security called by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Tanzania beginning on Wednesday, the state media reported in Harare. An SADC official had said the meeting was to focus in part on Zimbabwe.
The 12-nation regional bloc has been under intense international pressure to intervene in the deepening political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe following an upsurge in political violence this month.
Gift Tandare (31) died when police crushed a prayer meeting in the western Harare township of Highfield, which authorities said was a banned political protest. Tsvangirai and 12 senior opposition colleagues were hospitalised after being injured in the police action and alleged they were assaulted with clubs and iron bars while under arrest without provoking police.
An unrepentant Mugabe said later that Tsvangirai and his followers started the violence and police used necessary force to stop the prayer meeting and warned pro-democracy activists police were ready to ”bash” them again.
”I don’t hate Mugabe. In fact, I think he needs psychiatric help,” Tsvangirai said.
He said there was no going back on a mounting opposition campaign of protests to demand reform and pressure Mugabe to step down.
”We will not betray Gift and the people who have sacrificed themselves for the people of this country,” he said.
Tsvangirai told reporters after the angry and boisterous two-and-half-hour memorial: ”We are mobilising our people. As you can see, everyone is united over the mobilisation and confronting the dictatorship.”
Arthur Mutambara, head of an opposition faction that split from Tsvangirai’s organisation, described Tandare as ”a freedom fighter and national liberation hero”, echoing terminology of the liberation war that ended white rule in 1980 and swept Mugabe to power.
In that war, Mugabe did not see combat, he said.
”Mugabe is a spineless coward who did not fire a pistol. We do not recognise him,” Mutambara said. ”It is freedom or death. If Zimbabweans are not prepared to die, they do not deserve freedom.”
Earlier this month, Mutambara said he would not stand against Tsvangirai if elections are held and would be expected to go along with any boycott.
Tandare was buried at his rural home in north-eastern Zimbabwe March 18 in the first state-assisted funeral given to an opposition activist killed in unrest.
His wife Sipiwe and the National Constitutional Assembly, a reform group to which he also belonged, said on Tuesday that Tandare’s body was removed by police from his Harare home without her consent for burial, evidently to avoid a possibly explosive funeral procession in the capital.
Lovemore Madhuku, head of the reform group — beaten by police on March 11 and wearing a sling supporting a broken arm on Tuesday — said authorities removed Tandare’s body in violation of deep-rooted African burial traditions and tribal culture that invited the wrath of most Zimbabweans.
A nephew of Tandare, George Ngwena, said tight security imposed by police and state agents at the family’s home village in the Mount Darwin district, 200km from Harare, prevented other family members attending the memorial.
Tandare is survived by his wife and three children, Fortunate (15), Lillian (11) and baby Gift Jnr, who is 17 months old. — Sapa-AP