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Published by the government of Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe: Whose Election Was It Anyway?

Stephen Gowans

23 May 2008

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opinion

Zimbabwes political opposition and its Western-sponsored civil society allies are concocting stories of an impending genocide to call for Western intervention to oust the economic nationalist Zanu-PF Government of President Mugabe.

Yet they themselves have used threats of violence to destabilise the country to pursue an agenda shaped by and conducive to the interests of Western corporations and investors and the white settler community.

The opposition had planned to use the March 29 elections to follow the colour revolution script written in Washington to springboard to power. That script called on the opposition to declare victory in elections before the first vote was cast, and then to denounce any outcome other than a clear opposition victory as evidence of electoral fraud.

If the opposition failed to prevail at the polls, its supporters were to be mobilised to take to the streets to bring down the Government, in a repeat of previous Western-engineered colour revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. On the eve of the election, Ian Makone, director of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's campaign, explained that the MDC would avoid the failures of the past. "The lesson from (the election of) 2002 is we didn't plan for after the vote. Everyone stayed at home and said we will go to the courts. What happened in Kenya was they knew there would be fraud and they were ready. We will be out in the streets celebrating when the polls close. It can turn into a protest easily. Zimbabweans are angry; they are desperate; they are ready to protest. It's the tipping point we are planning for."

But when the opposition's charges of vote rigging fell flat as election results showed the governing Zanu-PF party losing its majority in the Assembly and the party's presidential candidate Robert Mugabe trailing Tsvangirai in the presidential contest, the edifice on which the MDC's colour revolution plan was predicated collapsed. If the vote had been rigged, President Mugabe's party would have sailed to victory. Instead, Zanu-PF trailed. The margin separating the two parties, however, was slim, revealing the opposition's support to be limited. With Tsvangirai unable to command overwhelming support, despite massive Western intervention in the election against President Mugabe, the opposition needed a way to grab power without having to rely on the uncertainties of a run-off election.

It decided to take a leaf from the book of its US and British patrons, inventing a pretext for military intervention on par with the WMD fiction used as the basis for US-British intervention in Iraq. Outside forces, preferably those of the former coloniser Britain, whose corporations still have a large stake in the country, would be called upon to intervene militarily to avert an impending genocide and in the process, install the MDC-T as the new government.

Over a month ago, MDC-T secretary-general Tendai Biti appealed to his "brothers and sisters across" Africa not to "wait for dead bodies in the streets of Harare". "Intervene now," he demanded. Twelve days later, with no sign of an impending genocide, Tsvangirai called on the West to launch a humanitarian intervention. The next day, church clerics weighed in with their own warning: "If nothing is done to help the people of Zimbabwe from their predicament, we shall soon be witnessing genocide similar to that experienced in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and other hotspots in Africa and elsewhere."

Two days later, MDC-T spokesman Nelson Chamisa warned that "if something isn't done in a few days, this country is going to be converted into a genocide zone" .That was more than three weeks ago. Half a month later and with still no looming genocide in sight, Biti sounded the genocide alarm once again, calling on Zimbabwe's neighbours to ease President Mugabe from power "before rivers of dead people start to flow, as they did in Rwanda".

It is true that there has been politically motivated violence in Zimbabwe, but it has occurred on both sides, is political, not ethnic, and has led to nowhere near the number of deaths that would even remotely qualify as genocide.

The stakes in the election aftermath are high. Violence has erupted on the part of some Zanu-PF supporters because they fear the loss of what they gained through their revolutionary struggles, and there's no doubt that an MDC-T government would set back the project of investing national liberation with real content. That the elections were neither free nor fair has only made Zanu-PF supporters more embittered by Zanu-PF's poor showing in the elections. Jabulani Sibanda, chairman of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans' Association, has criticised the vote for being held "when people were being pushed by hunger and illegal sanctions to conduct themselves in a way that could have been different". And Zanu-PF itself has challenged the fairness of the elections, pointing out that:

l NGOs distributing food threatened to cut off food aid if Zanu-PF won the election.

l The sanctions, which will be removed if Zanu-PF is ousted, amount to Western blackmail.

l The campaigns of the MDC-T and former Zanu-PF member Simba Makoni were financed by foreign governments and corporations.

l Western-financed anti-Zanu-PF radio stations, including Radio SW Africa (financed by the US State Department) and the Voice of America's Studio 7 stepped up their broadcasts during the election period.

l MDC activists doubled as voter educators working for the US government-financed Zimbabwe Election Support Network and used their position to promote the opposition under the guise of explaining electoral procedures.

There's no question there has been massive Western interference in the elections. During the election campaign British Prime Minister Gordon Brown informed the British Law Society that his government's funding to civil society organisations in Zimbabwe opposing President Mugabe's Government had been stepped up. On May 14, 2007 Australia announced it would spend A$18 million backing critics of President Mugabe, two-thirds of which was slated to be spent in the run-up to the elections. And this doesn't include the much more extensive funding President Mugabe's opponents have received from the United States, other Western governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals.

Western interference has made the post-election period one aptly described by Sibanda as "a battle between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries: Zimbabwean people represented by President Mugabe and foreign interests (represented by) the MDC". Under these conditions, and especially considering that MDC-T youth activists have a history of using violence to provoke the police, and then to use the police response to paint the Government as authoritarian and repressive, some degree of political violence is inevitable. But is it out of hand? And is it one-sided?

The documentation of violence against MDC supporters has been gathered by the US Embassy in Harare, which is hardly neutral and has an interest in discrediting Zanu-PF to bring its favoured vehicle, the MDC, to power. Human Rights Watch, which is dominated by former members of the US foreign policy establishment, has also been involved. But even HRW acknowledges the violence isn't exclusive to supporters of Zanu-PF. "Eyewitnesses told Human Rights Watch that . . . MDC supporters had burned homes of known Zanu-PF supporters and officials." Louise Arbour, the UN's top human rights official, who, in previous jobs has invariably sided with the US and Britain, notes that the information she has "received suggests an emerging pattern of political violence" that is not exclusively inflicted by supporters of Zanu-PF.

Kingsley Mamabolo, a senior South African official who led the region's observer team for the March 29 elections, agrees that violence is "taking place on both sides", as do human rights and doctors' groups in Harare, most of which have Western sources of funding. Paul Themba Nyathi, a civil rights lawyer and MDC member, says that "Tsvangirai's followers seem to be saying to themselves that they can win elections by beating people and by using the crudest methods of intimidation". This has largely escaped the attention of the media, he adds, "because the big prize is still to rid the country of Mugabe". Police arrested 58 opposition activists on May 9 on suspicion of setting fire to the homes of Zanu-PF members. On May 14, they arrested 50 Zanu-PF activists.

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