Mugabe could gone by Monday

[Teesside White]

lets hope that the rumours of a victory for the opposition are true and Mugabe is forced out

if he does lose then the new government must immediately place him under arrest, try him for crimes against humanity and sentence him to death

[El Morto La Hoja!]

.... does the opposition winning mean anything in a country without the rule of law...?

[Teesside White]

no idea....but its a step in the right direction if they get rid of Mugabe

[El Morto La Hoja!]

Zimbabwe govt warns opposition over victory claims

Reuters
By MacDonald Dzirutwe

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's opposition said on Sunday it had won the most crucial election since independence but President Robert Mugabe's government warned its opponents that premature victory claims would amount to an attempted coup.

Tendai Biti, secretary general of the main MDC opposition party, told diplomats and observers overnight that early results posted at polling stations showed the MDC was victorious. "We have won this election, we have won this election," he said.

Officials said they would begin announcing results of the presidential, parliamentary and local polls on Sunday. Voting ended at 7 p.m. (6:00 p.m. BST) on Saturday.

Zimbabwe's security forces, which have thrown their backing firmly behind Mugabe, said before the election they would not allow a victory declaration before counting was complete.

"It is called a coup d'etat and we all know how coups are handled," government spokesman George Charamba told the state-owned Sunday Mail.

Residents in the eastern opposition stronghold of Manicaland said riot police stopped a victory demonstration by about 200 MDC supporters. There was no violence, they said.

Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, faced his most formidable challenge in the election against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and ruling ZANU-PF party defector Simba Makoni campaigning on the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy.

Although the odds seem stacked against Mugabe, 84, analysts believe he will be declared the winner, and the opposition accused him of widespread vote-rigging.

FRAUD

African observers say they detected fraud in Saturday's ballot.

Mugabe, who accuses the West of sabotaging Zimbabwe's economy, expressed confidence on Saturday he would be returned to office. "We will succeed. We will conquer," he said.

He rejected vote-rigging allegations.

Once-prosperous Zimbabwe is suffering from the world's highest inflation rate of more than 100,000 percent, chronic shortages of food and fuel, and an HIV/AIDS epidemic that has contributed to a steep decline in life expectancy.

Biti said the MDC's election agents had reported that early results showed Tsvangirai was projected to win 66 percent of the vote in the capital Harare, an opposition stronghold.

He said Tsvangirai had made significant inroads in Mugabe's rural strongholds by leading in the southern province of Masvingo and Mashonaland Central Province, north of Harare, where the MDC has not won a parliamentary seat since 2000.

Observers from the Pan-African parliament said in a letter to the electoral commission they had found more than 8,000 non-existent voters registered on empty land in a Harare constituency.

Most international observers were banned and a team from the regional grouping, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), did not comment on Sunday. Critics say the SADC, which has tried to mediate over Zimbabwe, is too soft on Mugabe.

If no candidate wins more than 51 percent of the vote, the election will go into a second round.

------------------------------

some of that sounds abit ominus....

[CHOPPER READ]

Mugabe will be living a life of luxury over here by tuesday knowing our stupid govt.

[El Morto La Hoja!]

and think he'd get sent to the hague if he set foot on british soil without diplomatic immunity...

[Pete the Wolf]

theteessidewhite said:

lets hope that the rumours of a victory for the opposition are true and Mugabe is forced out

if he does lose then the new government must immediately place him under arrest, try him for crimes against humanity and sentence him to death

Nah, prison for what's left of his life. See how he enjoys living the conditions that his countrymen have been suffering under his rule.

[El Morto La Hoja!]

... and make him shave that stupid tasch....

[Mrs H]

So it's Thursday and he still hasn't gone. You could have been a little more subtle with your vote rigging Robert!

[PureOldGold]

its gonna be a very long time until Mugabe goes.

[Mrs H]

Rumour is he's done a bunk!

[URRZZZ!!!]

I think a note of caution is needed. Obviously Mugabe's reign coming to an end is only a good thing, but I can't imagine something so big coming and going without some sort of violence. I'd also say cast your minds back 28 years when everyone thought Mugabe would be a good thing for Zimbabwe. Lets hope this new era is a good one and not a case of one evil leader taking over from anohter - which has happened far to often in the past.

[Neko Bazu]

I think Tsvgrthingy does honestly have good intentions, coming into power. However, whether or not the old adage about power corrupting comes to pass yet again remains to be seen.

[PASTIE]

Now they're encircling journalists and ransacking opposition HQ. The signs are not good.

If Mugabe goes, for the sake of an attempt at a peaceful transfer I suspect that he will end up in Malaysia with all of his big business buddies and die an old and opulent man in palacial surroundings free from punishment like Idi Amin did in Saudi.

I travelled in Zimbabwe in 1995 and loved it so much I considered staying and looking for work. Mugabe at the time was massively popular and he was taking all manner of socially conscious initiatives. Even as a visitor there, you were encouraged to be educated as on the entrance to every state run park or museum there was a notice declaring that whilst Western tourists were charged double the entrance fee of a Zimbabwean national we were earning on average fourteen times more and therefore were getting in proportionately far cheaper. I had no problem with that. There were housing schemes and education programmes plus all manner of environmental initiatives which looking back were way ahead of their time.

It was a lush green idyllic countryside (in the South and East where we travelled) and the idea that somewhere so fertile could now be suffering famine is extraordinary. The brutality that replaced the tranquility and the poverty that emerged from the potential in Zimbabwe is a crime for which Mugabe should be accountable. I don't see that it will happen, however, and if it does I think an awful lot more people may be allowed to suffer before he permits any suffering or retribution to be allowed upon him.

As for coming to Britain, I think we'd be last on the list. Besides, we seem to prefer ailing senile South American fascists as we had a better trading relationship with them

[Pete the Wolf]

I'd be interested to see Tsvangirai's popularity a year or two from now. He's going to be coming into power in a country suffering 100 000% inflation and 80% unemployment (if reports are to be believed). There's some major rebuilding required and I'd like to see how long he gets before the population get restless.

[Neko Bazu]

Let's face it, he's got the "at least it's not Mugabe" card to play for a good six months...

[Pete the Wolf]

True, but given that the 'land reform process' began in 2000, this country's been going downhill for 8 years and it's gonna take a lot longer than that for it to be back to the way it once was. Will the population be so keen to wait that long?

[Neko Bazu]

Given what I know of Zimbabwean people (I've met many at work), they'll be happy to just see it get a little better - at risk of sounding patronising, they really are happy to seize any improvement on their circumstances at the moment. Hence why one guy in our factory, who has a BSc in chemical analysis (or something similarly impressive and brainy, anyway) jumped at the opportunity to come over here and become a factory floor grunt, lugging bags of material round all day, and why so many my sister's met at college have no complaints about holding down two jobs around their college course just to pay the bills. Anything that improves their life will be gratefully received.

I know there'll be no miracle fix, but baby steps will be enough, as long as they can see progress being made.

[Pete the Wolf]

Can't find the story now, but BBC had something on Monday about poll officials being arrested for not announcing enough votes for Mugabe.

[Neko Bazu]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7332941.stm

President Robert Mugabe's party has asked Zimbabwe's electoral officials to delay presidential poll results to check "errors and miscalculations".

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change said the move was illegal - a recount is possible only after the result has been published.

They have asked the High Court to publish the outcome immediately.

The MDC believes its leader Morgan Tsvangirai won outright in the vote held eight days ago.

The opposition party has also denied it had proposed a unity government. A minister had earlier said Zanu-PF had rejected an opposition call for a coalition.

On Saturday, the opposition accused President Mugabe of "preparing a war".

And the farmers' union said a number of white-owned farms had been briefly invaded by war veterans' groups loyal to Mr Mugabe in southern Masvingo.

A spokesman said the situation was under control after police intervened to disperse them.

Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party has cited what it claims are anomalies in the presidential vote despite the fact the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has still to release the result.

Information Minister Bright Matonga told the BBC the anomalies were with the collation of the results - there was a discrepancy between the voting results put outside polling stations and the form sent to the central election commission.

It was not clear if this meant the whole vote had to be counted again.

The minister insisted the request did not amount to a recount - which has been dismissed as illegal by MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti.

"The [Electoral] Act says that you ask for a recount within 48 hours of the counting," he said.

"Counting takes place at polling stations so it's within 48 hours of that.

"It's madness literally and metaphorically".

According to papers submitted to the ZEC by Zanu-PF, the number of votes for Mr Mugabe recorded at a number of polling stations were reduced before being sent on to electoral officials.

Some ZEC officials working in the Midlands constituencies of Mberengwa East, West, North and South had since been arrested, the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper said.

"As will soon become apparent, the constituency elections officer and his team committed errors of miscounting that are so glaring as to prejudice not just our clients' candidate but also his co-contestants," Zanu-PF's letter said, according to the Sunday Mail.

In a separate article, the Sunday Mail quoted Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa as saying the Zanu-PF had rejected an offer from Mr Tsvangirai to form a national unity government, but Mr Biti denied that an offer had been made.

Before the High Court judge on Sunday, MDC lawyer Alec Muchadehama said the results "must be announced forthwith", as they had been available since 30 March.

But ZEC lawyer George Chikumbirike said the court's remit did not include ruling on the case - only ZEC could adjudicate.

The court is to rule on Monday on whether it has jurisdiction over the case.

The Zanu-PF complaint came hours after the ZEC declared the final results of last week's Senate election. It said Mr Mugabe's party had won 30 seats, with the combined opposition taking the same number.

In the lower house, opposition parties took 109 seats, while Zanu-PF won just 97 - the first time it has failed to win a majority since independence from the UK in 1980.

On Saturday Mr Tsvangirai claimed victory for the first time since the vote, saying figures posted outside polling stations confirmed he had reached the required threshold of more than 50% of the vote to win outright - making a run-off unnecessary.

He also claimed that the country's central bank was printing money "for the finance of violence", and called for dialogue on a peaceful transition.

Mr Mugabe, 84, came to power 28 years ago at independence on a wave of optimism.

But in recent years Zimbabwe has been plagued by the world's highest inflation, as well as acute food and fuel shortages, which correspondents say have driven many voters to back the opposition.

And the story Pete mentioned...

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7335881.stm

Zimbabwean police have arrested at least five officials for allegedly under-counting votes cast for President Robert Mugabe in last month's election.

Police said the election officials have been charged with fraud and criminal abuse of duty, accused of taking nearly 5,000 votes away from Mr Mugabe.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon joined international calls for the urgent release of the results.

The opposition MDC is seeking a court ruling to force publication of results.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election by a clear majority.

But Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF is seeking a recount.

On Monday, High Court judge Tendai Uchena dismissed the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission's (ZEC) argument that his court did not have jurisdiction and set the case for Tuesday.

The judge said he would decide whether to treat it as an urgent case, before hearing the actual arguments.

If he decides it is urgent, he may rule on Wednesday.

"I think ZEC just wants to delay this whole thing," said opposition lawyer Alec Muchadehama.

The ZEC lawyer said the votes were still being verified, while the ruling party's demands for a recount was also delaying matters.

On Monday, Mr Tsvangirai visited regional powerhouse South Africa, where he met ANC President Jacob Zuma.

No word has emerged from those talks. Mr Mugabe's critics have long urged South Africa to take a tougher line on Zimbabwe's leader over allegations of human rights abuses.

Government ministers have said the arrested election officials were paid to falsify the election results.

They say the results posted outside polling stations showed more votes for Mr Mugabe than the forms forwarded to Harare for counting.

"That's absolute rubbish," MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

"That's the desperate act of a dinosaur regime that has lost an election," he said.

Mr Biti said that anyone who worked for the ZEC was carefully vetted by the authorities.

He also urged the international community, and African leaders in particular, to press Mr Mugabe to accept defeat, saying otherwise there could be "bloodshed".

"They want to see dead bodies before they send Kofi Annan," he said, referring to recent violence over disputed elections in Kenya.

On Monday, two foreign nationals accused of working as journalists without accreditation were freed on bail and are due to appear in court again on Thursday.

Earlier, Mr Mugabe called on the black population to ensure white farmers did not regain seized land, reports say.

He said black Zimbabweans could not afford to "retreat in the battle for land", the Herald newspaper said.

"Land must remain in our hands. The land is ours, it must not be allowed to slip back into the hands of whites," he is quoted as saying.

At least 18 of Zimbabwe's few remaining white-owned farms have been invaded since Saturday, farmers say, raising fears of renewed violence ahead of a possible run-off in the presidential election.

In 2000, there were 4,000 white farmers working on much of the best land in Zimbabwe.

Just 300 now remain after a campaign of often violent land seizures, with the land redistributed to black farmers.

The government says the land reform programme was needed to right colonial era wrongs, when black villagers were evicted from the most fertile land.

The opposition says the farm invasions were a pretext to intimidate people in rural areas and has led to economic ruin.

This year's election campaign was relatively peaceful but the MDC fears that the new land invasions are a precursor to another campaign of violence.

Some say the occupations have taken place in rural areas, which voted for the opposition.