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Zimbabwe's election may be a botched robbery

By Tony Karon

So decrepit is the regime of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe that his party may lose a parliamentary election despite an energetic campaign to steal it. In spite of Sunday's warning by European Union observers that the two-day election had been anything but "free and fair" in light of a systematic campaign of violent intimidation by the ruling ZANU-PF, eight of the first 13 seats reporting on Monday went to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. This for a parliament in which the ruling party had previously controlled all but three of the 150 seats.

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Those early returns point to a stunning reversal for the party that led the liberation war against white minority rule and has ruled the country, with Mugabe at its head, ever since independence 20 years ago. ZANU campaigned on the basis of its liberation war record, attempting to demonize the opposition by casting them as stooges of the country's 70,000 remaining whites. The centerpiece of Mugabe's campaign has been the mass occupation by squatters of some 870 of the country's 4,000 white-owned farms, which occupy the best 70 percent of Zimbabwe's arable land while millions of black subsistence farmers scratch out a living on the remainder. All this was accompanied by at least 40 killings, incidences of kidnapping and torture of opposition candidates, confiscation of identity documents and fraudulent alteration of voter rolls. But for many Zimbabwe's 5 million voters, the government's sudden interest in "redistributing" white farms is seen as a cynical attempt at exploiting rural misery to deflect attention from its own legacy of corruption, catastrophic economic mismanagement, military misadventures and violent suppression of dissent. (The peasants know best of all that many of the farms previously acquired by the government in land-redistribution programs became the property of Mugabe cohorts rather than being parceled out among the rural poor.) Early returns suggest Zimbabweans are no longer buying Mugabe's rhetoric, as an untested opposition party that risked life and limb by contesting all 120 seats up for election rides a wave of voter protest against the poverty and stagnation over which Mugabe has presided.

Not that the result, whatever it is, will make a jot of difference to the immediate plans of the man who has ruled Zimbabwe as a personal fiefdom for the past 20 years. "ZANU-PF will form the government whatever the results," the party's national chairman, John Nkomo, vowed over the weekend. "Mugabe can have a cabinet of just five if he wants. Mugabe is an institution." Indeed, the fact that some 20 percent of the seats are reserved for his appointees and that a two-thirds majority is required for a move to unseat him before the next presidential election in 2002 gives him legal cover to hang onto power. But "cohabitation," as the French call a situation when the presidency and the legislature are in the hands of rival parties, would unlikely be a comfortable fit for a Zimbabwean strongman for whom it portends the final humiliation two years from now. And the danger is that the greater the challenge Mugabe perceives, the more desperate he becomes: The land invasions and accompanying violence began only after Mugabe lost a referendum in February that would have dramatically increased his constitutional powers. Then again, for the ZANU apparatchiks whose well-being depends on control over the state, a mauling at the polls and the consequent escalation of domestic protests and international pressure could be the cue to retire the 75-year-old strongman.

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