The National Democratic Institute (NDI) today condemned the brutal actions of the Zimbabwe government and called on it to accept the results of the March 29 elections.

“By refusing to release the results of the presidential poll and engaging in violence and intimidation, the government is violating the fundamental civil and political rights of the Zimbabwean people,” said NDI President Kenneth Wollack.

“The government should not operate on the assumption that it can act with impunity,” he said.   “It should know that the international community is watching and prepared to take action.”

NDI expressed deep concern at the government’s decision today to raid the offices of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) in Harare and detain its program manager.

“This courageous group played a historic role by its election monitoring efforts and by accurately projecting the outcome of the presidential election through data collection of actual polling site results,” Wollack said.   That projection showed that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, clearly won the popular vote.   “These activities by ZESN were consistent with Zimbabwean laws and international standards for democratic elections,” he said.

ZESN, an NDI partner organization, is composed of 38 leading Zimbabwean civil society groups.   It is a non-partisan, non-governmental organization that has conducted election observation in Zimbabwe since 2002.

For the March 29 election, ZESN used information gathered by accredited observers from a random representative sample of polling stations in all provinces of the country.   ZESN’s results showed that opposition presidential candidate Tsvangirai garnered 49.4 percent of the vote with a margin of error that could have put him over the 50 percent plus one needed for an outright victory.   President Robert Mugabe received 41.8 percent, according to ZESN.   The official results have never been released.

Wollack noted that since the election, the regime or its supporters have arrested, detained, harassed and inflicted violence on opposition figures and supporters, workers from non-governmental organizations from inside and outside the country, journalists, and others who have committed no crime and are operating within Zimbabwean law.