by Banning Eyre, March 13, 2002

The writing has been on the walls for years. When I visited Zimbabwe a year ago, the government campaign of violence and intimidation was already well underway. Reports of bloody assaults on homes, gathering places, and institutions filled the newspapers. I heard first hand accounts of trickery in the rural areas, such as government representatives going around with high powered binoculars, showing them to uneducated people and saying, "We'll be watching when you vote." Meanwhile, in Harare, Mugabe had just bullied the chief justice of the High Court out of power and inserted a man loyal to him--an effort to emasculate the last branch of government he could not personally control. This had the desired effect of clearing the way for his previously unconstitutional land seizing policy, a cynical and destructive stunt aimed only at bolstering his case for re-election. And much more was to come. Over the past year, the government passed laws to disenfranchise young people and expatriates, to restrict foreign and local press coverage, and to stop independent observers from monitoring the elections. The intimidation ramped up to include roadblocks where people were presented with the option of showing a Zanu-PF party card, or being severely beaten. Young boys in rural farms were forced into government run camps to be trained as thugs for the re-election cause. On the eve of the vote, the government cooked up a supposed MDC assassination plot and saturated the airwaves with an obviously doctored video purporting to show opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai planning to kill the president. It also withheld the list of urban polling stations until the last moment, and then revealed that there would be about half as many as in previous elections, guaranteeing long waits and widespread disenfranchisement. Over the election weekend itself, the signs of final tampering were everywhere, from the restricted zones in rural areas where voting could not be observed, to the long lines at city polling stations where voters likely to oppose Mugabe were processed so slowly that fewer than half were able to vote, despite the showy, but virtually meaningless addition of a 3rd day of voting. There were arrests, beatings, fishy reports about massively high turnouts in rural areas. Observers were not allowed to ride with ballot boxes to counting centers. And despite worldwide outcry at all these irregularities, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa ludicrously claimed that the vote had been peaceful and fair. So it was not really a surprise to hear that--lo and behold--the thug Mugabe held the day with 54% of the "official" vote. Still, it is crushingly sad. Where are people to turn when democratic institutions are so corrupted and broken? Where is there hope in a country ravaged by economic ruin, misrule, AIDS, drought, and a government that thinks democracy and the rule of law are theatre projects--exercises in smoke and mirrors--rather than principles to live by? Thomas Mapfumo's freedom songs have been a lifeline for Zimbabwe since before it attained its independence. But so far, they have not been enough to defeat today's oppressor. His exile seems likely to continue. Mugabe's racist rhetoric will too. The refusal of Commonwealth countries like Nigeria and South Africa to condemn Mugabe more strongly before the elections is puzzling indeed. Still more puzzling, South Africa's observers called the vote "legitimate," an ominous development, as it could be an invitation to similar trouble there. Today's news means that southern Africa will continue to linger in the ugly, hateful swamp of post-colonialism rather than moving on towards a better world. The only people celebrating today--other than Mugabe's greedy goons--are the unreformed, white Rhodesians who can now gloat, sip their gin-and-tonics and say, with some justification, "We told you so." Shame, shame, shame!