By the next day, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai, was claiming victory – and it wasn’t a hollow claim. There is no doubt whatsoever that they did, in fact, win, and win overwhelmingly. By April 2 it was clear, even from official results, that Zanu-PF had lost its majority in parliament. The MDC had won the parliamentary election with a huge majority. But even more astoundingly, Morgan Tsvangirai had clearly won the presidential election as well. This was admitted even by the State-controlled Herald newspaper, for it predicted a run-off – a clear admission that Mugabe had not won. It was admitted, too, by Zanu-PF, for the party called for a recount of the votes even before the results of the election were supposedly known! The party would not have done this if it knew it had won.
Also, if Mugabe had won, the results would have been made public within a day or two of the election, amidst much crowing and strutting; but this was not done. And indeed, over four weeks after the election the results were still not made known! Nothing proves that Mugabe lost the election more forcefully than this.
The election results caught Mugabe and Zanu-PF by surprise. Although they certainly rigged the elections to some extent, they were so confident of winning anyway, thanks to massive intimidation over many months, that they did not bother to rig the results sufficiently – and they got a nasty shock when, despite the intimidation, the Zimbabwean people voted overwhelmingly against him. So overwhelmingly, in fact, that even with the rigging that went on, it was just not enough to ensure Mugabe’s victory. His defeat was total. It was crushing. And this is why the election results were not released, and still have not been released. And the delay has given Mugabe time to tamper with the ballots.
How did the MDC snatch such an amazing victory from the jaws of what looked like certain defeat, being up against an incredibly brutal, vicious police state with vast resources, whose president has boasted that he has degrees in violence (not an idle boast as he is a Marxist terrorist who committed terrible atrocities during the 1970s terrorist revolution against Rhodesia)? After all, there was nothing whatsoever free or fair about this election from the Zanu-PF side. Sure, Mugabe saw to it that election day itself was mostly peaceful, so as to con the election observers into thinking all was well. But in the months before the election, there was massive intimidation countrywide, and MDC supporters were beaten, tortured, kidnapped, even murdered. Morgan Tsvangirai himself was savagely beaten. The MDC was not given anything like the access to the media that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF had. It was also not given access to voters’ rolls. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission itself, which oversaw the elections, was run by Zanu-PF people. The voters’ roll had something in the region of two million dead or departed people still on it, allowing massive organised “ghost” voting. Zanu-PF had also filled the voters’ rolls with hundreds of thousands of false names and addresses. There were “ghost” polling stations, known only to Zanu-PF agents. And the government had printed millions more ballot papers than there were voters in the country, so that they could be filled in as needed in favour of Zanu-PF. Police, mostly very pro-Mugabe, were allowed into polling stations to “help” voters vote for the “right” party. Large numbers of voters were turned away from polling stations after being told that their names were not on the rolls. And in a country facing starvation, as an election incentive Zanu-PF distributed food mainly to those who were its own supporters, not to opposition people. Some three million Zimbabweans, or a quarter of the country’s population, who now live in neighbouring countries where they fled to avoid starving to death, were also not allowed to vote.
Thus everything about this election was tipped in Mugabe’s favour! So how, then, did the MDC pull it off? They did so by sheer, dogged, desperate determination, having reached the point of such despair that no amount of threats, intimidation, torture or violence could prevent them turning out to vote Mugabe out of power; and they also did it by a very simple but clever tactic. Prior to the election they managed to secure what looked like a very small concession: to have the lists of election results posted outside polling stations as soon as they were known. This simple step prevented the massive rigging that there would otherwise have been; for as soon as the results were posted outside each polling station, photographs were taken of the results by cellphone and digital camera and these were sent off to independent polling verification centres in South Africa.
The MDC’s Eddie Cross, writing from Zimbabwe, said: “The outcome of the election has been a stunning victory for the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai. Many of the strongholds of Zanu-PF have fallen to overwhelming MDC majorities.” Opposition to Mugabe was like a tsunami, he said. He attributed the MDC success to “the support network built up over several years in the region and these hidden heroes are very much responsible for the activity everyone has seen in the past few weeks [before the election] – the adverts, the flyers, the postal war and the funding for our candidates. Finally the anti-rigging operation. We knew how they had rigged previous elections and we set out to try and stop a recurrence. The whistle-blower campaign was a key part of that…. The many people who climbed in and said ‘one more time’ and spent days in the bush helping with the count and the reporting system are unsung heroes. Then the people – they had just had enough, had enough of arrogance and being taken for granted, enough of the sufferings and destruction of the economy…. They chose to suffer in silence and then go out and vote. For me they are the real champions and I hope they will never again be taken for granted.”
Truly we take our hats off to the ordinary people of Zimbabwe, who against such a monstrous regime stood firm and said, “Enough is enough!” and voted the tyrant and his cronies out of power. Unlike Mugabe and his terrorist organisation, Zanu-PF, who came to power through violence and terror 28 years ago, the people of Zimbabwe did not break the law, they did not rise up in violence against the State, they simply voted the tyrant out, legally and peacefully, even in the face of unbelievable cruelty.
But the big question after the election was: would the 84-year-old dictator, who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years with an iron fist, accept defeat and bow out? Initially there was real hope that he would indeed do so. Zimbabweans, and South Africans too, held their breath as it became clear that they were witnessing an extraordinary historical moment: the crushing defeat, at the polls and despite the rigging which accompanies Zimbabwean elections, of the Marxist monster who has taken the country known as the breadbasket of southern Africa and turned it into the world’s basket-case. Was the nightmare finally going to be over?
Alas, no. For a brief few days, it looked like springtime had come to Zimbabwe. They were exciting days indeed. We who live in this part of the world were amazed, stunned, and exuberant. For a short while it really seemed as if things were about to change. But those of us who live in Africa, and study Africa, and know Africa, were cautious. Robert Mugabe is no fool. He is a very clever, very cunning man. And sure enough, it eventually dawned on everyone that Mugabe was not going to concede defeat. He was going to do everything he could to cling to power, use every brutal tactic of suppression and terror of which he is a past master. And very soon the world started to see Mugabe taking revenge, and consolidating his grip in defiance of the election results. Tsvangirai and the MDC won the election, they are the true new leaders of Zimbabwe, but in Africa, it’s not the man with the most votes who takes over, it’s the man with the guns. And at this stage Robert Mugabe still holds all the guns in his blood-stained hands.
It started, in fact, the very day after the elections, when the MDC offices were raided by the police. Four foreign journalists were also detained.
Then, on April 4, so-called “war veterans” from the terrorist war of the 1970s – but mostly unemployed youths who played no part in that revolution as they were either not born or too young to have done so, but are useful thugs Mugabe has no qualms about using to achieve his goals – marched through the streets of Harare, the capital, threatening to again start seizing white-owned farms, as they had done in previous years. Clearly, Mugabe was targeting Zimbabwe’s whites once again. They are an easy target. But not only the whites: his storm troopers started beating up black MDC supporters, threatening them, etc.
On April 5, Tsvangirai called on Mugabe to accept defeat and step down. He warned that the military, loyal to Mugabe, was now directly interfering with the work of the electoral commission by arresting its officials and moving the work of the verification of the presidential ballots to a secret place, where MDC representatives were not present. There was no doubt at all that the delay in releasing the presidential election results was to enable Mugabe’s people to inflate the results in their favour, by reducing Tsvangirai’s presidential vote to below the 50%-plus-one result required for him to win the presidency.
Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of plotting a campaign of violence to bolster his chances of winning a run-off. Armed police barred MDC officials from filing an urgent application in the High Court demanding that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission release the presidential results (imagine a country where such an extraordinary step was even necessary!). On this same day, reports start pouring in of “war veterans” having again started to take over the few remaining white-owned farms. Very soon, some 30 farms had been invaded.
For the few remaining commercial white farmers in Zimbabwe, this was a time of great fear: crowds of angry “war vets” outside farm gates, beating drums, chanting, smoking joints and drinking alcohol, working themselves up into a frenzy. Inside the farmhouses, frightened families clustered together, uncertain, wondering what to do, their exit roads off their farms blocked by “war vets” baying for their blood. The farm invasions were in full swing – eight years after the first invasions of white-owned farms began, resulting in the deaths of farmers and their labourers, the violent takeovers of their farms, and the destruction of Zimbabwe’s once world-renowned agricultural sector and its agriculture-based economy, which led in turn to widespread famine and starvation across the country. Over 4000 white-owned farms were seized at that time. Now it was the turn of the few remaining white farmers. The president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union said, “We were told that they [the orders to invade] come from the very highest levels of government. They said they wanted to see white farmers’ bodies on the streets.” He also correctly said, “People are being paid to basically carry out the wishes of the highest office. This is purely racial.”
This was Mugabe’s revenge against those who had supported the opposition MDC in the election: farmers, their labourers, everyone. It was payback time – and as always in the Zimbabwe of Robert Mugabe, it was brutal. Not only were the white farmers forcefully kicked off their own land, but their black labourers were beaten up and their huts were burnt down. The Zanu-PF thugs made use of the lists of results which had been posted outside polling stations to target the areas where the voting had gone against Mugabe.
On April 7, the State-owned Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying, “Land must remain in our hands. The land is ours, it must not be allowed to slip back into the hands of whites.” Apart from the naked racism and incitement to violence against whites in these words, it shows yet again that despite the fact that these whites are Zimbabwean citizens, Mugabe does not view them as such, but as foreigners who do not belong, who must be driven off the land and out of their country. And this despite the fact that Zimbabwe’s remaining whites are a very tiny minority in the country, and that his crushing defeat at the polls was brought about by millions of black voters.
Those white farmers who could do so took their families to the cities, abandoning their farms to the drunken mobs of thugs. But others were blocked from leaving and were holed up in their homes on their farms, cowering behind security fences and bullet-proof doors.
One farmer, driven off his land, said: “I have wondered what this day would be like, whether it would come after all these years, and now I am wondering if this is it, or if I will be able to get back.” He was forced to leave his farm, abandoning his hundreds of black farm labourers, as well as the fields full of mature crops at a time when Zimbabwe faces its worst food crisis ever.
On April 7, Mugabe came under international criticism, with calls from the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union for the electoral commission to release the results of the presidential election. Of course, to date Mugabe has still refused to permit the release of the results. He held an election, he lost, and now he refuses to permit the results to be known but continues to rule the country anyway.
Such criticism as was heard from the West was lame-duck criticism of course, and Mugabe knows it. Britain and the United States interfered constantly in Rhodesia’s affairs in the 1960s and 1970s, pressurising Ian Smith to capitulate to the Marxist terrorist Robert Mugabe and others. This disaster in the former Rhodesia is very much their doing. And yet now – after Mugabe has destroyed his country, murdered tens of thousands, etc., they lamely bleat but that’s all. They were more than willing to stick their noses into Rhodesia’s business back then, but they are very reluctant now to do the same with Zimbabwe!
And, as always, Mugabe’s fellow black African leaders closed ranks with him. On April 9, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, current head of the Southern African Development Corporation (SADC), announced an emergency SADC summit in Lusaka, Zambia, to discuss the election deadlock. People thought, “Oh, good. African leaders are at last beginning to stand against Mugabe.” How wrong they were. On April 12, South African President Thabo Mbeki met Mugabe in Zimbabwe, en route to the SADC summit in Zambia, and afterwards said to journalists: “There is no crisis in Zimbabwe.” The world could hardly believe its ears. Opposition supporters had been arrested and tortured, journalists had been banned, white-owned farms had been violently invaded and taken over – but still the South African president could walk hand in hand with Comrade Bob at the airport, and then later he could look into the cameras and with a straight face say, “There is no crisis in Zimbabwe.” It’s called spin, and African leaders are masters at it.
Mbeki added that the electoral commission must be given time to release the results. But two weeks had already passed! How much time was required? And as this is being written, over four weeks have now passed, and still no results have been released. Mugabe clearly lost, and Mbeki knew it – but his party, the ANC, has no moral qualms about election-rigging – it came to power itself in 1994 through what was probably the most rigged election in history – and it certainly wants its old buddy Mugabe to stay in power.
Mugabe himself refused to attend the SADC summit, saying, “He [Mbeki] is going to the summit, I’m not…. We’re very good friends, very good brothers. But sometimes we also have other business that holds us back.” The real reason, of course, for his not attending was that he feared if he left the country, he would be unseated in an uprising.
And, predictably, the SADC meeting achieved nothing. When it came to the crunch, African leaders rallied behind Mugabe, as they always do. Oh, sure, the Zambian president said some good things. He said, for example, that SADC could “no longer stand by while one of its member countries experiences political and economic difficulties.” Good as far as it went. But then he added that the SADC summit would not put Mugabe “on trial.”
Most of the African leaders are cut from the same terrorist cloth as Mugabe. They are old Communist comrades in arms, and they won’t utter a squeak of protest against their beloved “comrade”. So they remain silent, proving yet again that in black Africa, the leaders only pay lip-service to democracy for the sake of fooling the West. And they succeed. On April 16, UN head Ban Ki-moon called on African leaders to step up efforts to end the crisis in Zimbabwe, saying, “The credibility of the democratic process in Africa could be at stake here.” He was right, of course, but he was naive if he thought African leaders would listen. American and European leaders remain woefully ignorant of how African leaders work. They are hoodwinked over and over again.
Nowhere in the world does a country have a presidential election, and then refuse to release the results! It is extraordinary, and it is criminal. But this is Africa, and this is Robert Mugabe, and this is Communism. As Stalin once said, “It’s not who votes who counts, it’s who counts the vote.”
Some three weeks after the election, Robert Mugabe vowed that Britain and the MDC would never “steal” his country. His reference to Britain has become a constant theme in his speeches, as he makes the claim, time and time again, that Britain, which once ruled Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) as a colony, is trying to “re-colonise” the country through the MDC. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate this claim. In his speech he said: “You want the British to come back again? You saw what they did when they heard that the MDC was winning. The whites in the UK, Australia and South Africa started coming in and some are still here in the hotels” – an apparent reference to Zimbabwe’s white farmers evicted from their land. “That [land being returned to white farmers] will never ever happen. Down with the British. Down with thieves who want to steal our country.” This from the man who has not only stolen it time and again, but raped it as well.
The previous day Mugabe said: “We should not let our children down by dropping our guard against imperialism, British imperialism, which is surreptitiously and clandestinely weaving its way through our society, trying to divide us.” Like the Marxist he is, he diverts the attention of the people from the real problems and the real enemies – namely, from himself and his party – to some imaginary danger, one which he has warned about so often that in the minds of many of his foolish followers it is now very real. It’s the old saying: tell a lie, tell it often enough, and the people will believe it as truth.
Any run-off election is likely to be doctored in Mugabe’s favour, for he could not only massively rig the results, but also many who voted against him the first time will have been intimidated into voting for him the second time.
Ominously, the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Constantine Chiwenga, a Mugabe loyalist, has reportedly taken personal control of Mugabe’s re-election bid. He met with provincial commanders of the army, police and secret service police to plan Mugabe’s campaign. These military men know that if Mugabe falls, they fall – and if Mugabe is ever tried for his crimes, they will be too. They have a vested interest in propping him up.
“Authoritative military sources said provincial joint committees manned by senior military, police and intelligence officers loyal to Mugabe will spearhead the campaign that they said will see unprecedented violence unleashed on supporters of opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai,” said Zim Online, an independent Zimbabwean news service. “The level of violence is going to be shocking,” a senior army officer was quoted as saying. “It is going to be a wave that will keep Tsvangirai’s supporters indoors and displaced. It is meant to ensure that only supporters of Mugabe will dare come out in large numbers to vote in the run-off election.”
Certainly there has been a massive increase in State-orchestrated violence since the election. As one example: a black woman who worked for the MDC was awoken at midnight by ten men who barged into her house, and dragged her, her sister and her aunt from their beds, saying, “Your man did not win this election. Next time you must get it right or you will die.” The truck they were in had no number plates, which was typical of those used by the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, the secret police. The women’s wrists and ankles were tied, and then they were pulled out onto the street and their bound hands were tied to the truck’s tow bar. The truck then sped off, dragging the women behind them with their flesh scraping off on the tarred road. Before she passed out from the pain, the woman heard the men shouting, “This is a war. We will keep fighting until we win.”
After finally being dumped on a roadside, it took her three days to receive hospital treatment for her by-then infected wounds.
Her story is just one of multiplied thousands that could be told, of the sheer brutality of the Mugabe regime, desperate to hold on to power, willing to stop at nothing to eliminate its opponents. In an area east of the city of Bulawayo, youth militia armed with AK-47s stopped traffic and ordered people off buses, then forced them at gunpoint to chant slogans praising Zanu-PF. They were beaten if they did not do so. The thugs said, “There will be a re-run for the presidential election and if you try and vote for the MDC again we will go to war. We are not asking you to vote Zanu, we are ordering you – or else you will be killed.”
In the lower-income Harare suburb of Glenview, soldiers went house to house, beating up men and youths. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Reports continue to pour in of the burning of people’s houses, beatings and torture – including burning molten plastic being dripped onto men’s backs. The MDC has stated that at least 10 of their supporters have been murdered so far, 500 have been hospitalised since the elections, and some 3000 have been displaced from their homes. On the 25th April, the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights reported that they had treated 62 people over a three-day period who had suffered violence and torture, and that this number under-reports the true total. Nine of these were women, and one was 84 years old. She was struck in the face with stones when she opened her door to unknown assailants, and she sustained serious facial injuries. The youngest was a one-year-old baby boy who suffered gastroenteritis with dehydration when he slept in the bush with his mother after their home was burnt down.
In addition, on the 25th April the MDC headquarters was invaded by riot police, who arrested scores of people there, many of whom were injured people who had fled the rural areas to seek safety in the MDC headquarters. Zanu-PF spread propaganda that those arrested were actually criminals who had participated in post-election violence – but this lie was exposed by the fact that 24 of those arrested were babies and 40 were children under the age of six!
And then – another development during these extraordinary weeks: a Chinese ship, carrying six containers holding 77 tons of armaments destined for the Zimbabwe Defence Ministry, docked at the outer anchorage of the harbour in Durban, South Africa. The armaments consisted of millions of rounds of AK-47 ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar bombs and mortar tubes for launching them. Clearly these weapons were being sent by Mugabe’s Red Chinese buddies to help him violently clamp down on all who oppose him. The Chinese denied it, of course, saying it was coincidental that the weapons were arriving now, but no one was believing that. Also, just as clearly, it was obviously felt that a South African port could be used, given the warm and cozy relations between SA’s ruling ANC and Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF. In the words of the editor of Noseweek, the South African investigative magazine which first blew the whistle on the ship, “the lack of an official reaction, added to the fact that the ship arrived at a South African port rather than going on the usual Mozambican route, suggests that the South African government was involved in the deal from the start and that it has been actively facilitating the deal.”
But although the SA government would doubtless have let the arms through, things went very wrong for them: when the information relating to the ship and its cargo was made public, massive opposition, within SA itself, from ordinary citizens, turned the whole matter into an embarrassment for the ANC, and the ship was prevented from offloading its cargo. The opposition Democratic Alliance’s defence spokesman said, correctly, “The world’s astonishment at President Mbeki’s political defence of Robert Mugabe will likely turn into outright anger as we are now not only denying the existence of a crisis in Zimbabwe, but also actively facilitating the arming of an increasingly despotic and desperate regime.”
Trade unionists at Durban harbour refused to handle the cargo, and religious leaders obtained a High Court order against the arms being offloaded and taken across SA to Zimbabwe. And shortly thereafter the ship sailed out of South African waters with its cargo.
From within Zimbabwe itself, ecumenical religious leaders warned on April 22 that post-election violence could reach genocidal proportions unless the international community intervened. “We warn the world that 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 hot spots in Africa and elsewhere,” they said. “Organised violence perpetrated against individuals, families and communities who are accused of campaigning or voting for the ‘wrong’ political party… has been unleashed throughout the country. People are being abducted, tortured, humiliated…” It also said there was widespread famine in the countryside. They were correct in all these statements.
But let it be clearly understood: in no way does this recent stance by certain religious leaders and trade unions in any way turn these people into the “good guys” in SA! These were the very same men and women who supported Zanu-PF’s terrorist revolution against the white Rhodesian government in the 1970s, and the ANC’s terrorist revolution against the white South African government in the 1970s and 1980s. They are, to a large measure, responsible for the coming to power of both these terrorist organisations! And yet now we are witnessing Marxist-supporting ecclesiastical leaders and others opposing the Marxist government in Zimbabwe. Why? Well, as so often happens, these liberal, Bible-denying, Bible-distorting, false “church” leaders, wolves in sheep’s clothing, throw their weight behind Marxist revolutions, thinking in their blind naivety that once the revolutionaries succeed, they will usher in some kind of earthly Utopia; and then, when it doesn’t happen, and when the same Marxists they helped to power turn out to be far worse than the governments they replaced – as inevitably happens – these “clergymen” then are shocked that their political heroes have let them down so badly. At least that’s true of some of them. For the rest, they are menpleasers: they keep a close eye on which way the wind of political opinion is blowing, and they are quick to position themselves as the supposed “defenders of the oppressed”, if it appears that the tide is turning against their former “heroes”. Robert Mugabe was enthusiastically supported, in the 1970s, by leftist religious leaders in Rhodesia and South Africa, who turned a blind eye to his atrocities; but only now that his people have turned against him are these same religious leaders turning against him as well.
It was pathetic to see Allan Boesak, one such Christ-denying cleric, lamenting the terrible state of Zimbabwe, and yet this man used to preach openly in front of the Communist hammer-and-sickle flag in South Africa!
Of course, these religious leaders lost no time in comparing what Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe to “apartheid” in South Africa. And many will nod their heads and say, “Yes, they’re the same.” No they are not! Not in the least. SA’s white government fought against Marxist guerillas who were using violence and terror against the population in order to come to power; the State was right in clamping down, and clamping down hard, on these murderers. In Zimbabwe, however, Mugabe has not been clamping down against terrorists, he has been brutally suppressing his own people, who have not risen up in violence against him. He has been responsible for the violence! There is a world of difference between the two cases. But the religious leaders will go on comparing the two nevertheless, deliberately misleading the ignorant.
So: what is going to happen next? Quite frankly, no one knows. There are three possibilities: Mugabe finally concedes defeat and steps down; or the brutal suppression of all who do not support Mugabe continues until the opposition is utterly smashed; or there is a civil war as pro- and anti-Mugabe forces clash. The first scenario is, humanly speaking, unlikely in the extreme, and would be virtually miraculous if it occurred; the second is, as things stand now, what is likely to occur, for it has already started and it is horrendously vicious and brutal; and the third, if it occurs, could lead to a protracted war in which untold thousands die and not only Zimbabwe but the entire southern African region is destabilised, as multiplied thousands of refugees continue to pour into South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and other neighbouring countries.
The situation is extremely grave. The rest of the world does not fully appreciate how all of southern Africa sits on a knife-edge right now.
This fearful situation in South Africa’s neighbouring country bodes ill for the future of elections in South Africa as well. If and when, one day, the ANC loses an election, will it also resort to the kind of violence that has been unleashed across Zimbabwe? Considering the cozy relationship between Mbeki and Mugabe, and between Mbeki’s ANC and Mugabe’s Zanu, it is a most distinct possibility. SA is a Communist-controlled country now, just like Zimbabwe. And when Marxists come to power in Africa, most of them do not leave power voluntarily, but only feet first and in a horizontal position. That is the grim reality. Ominously, the signs are all there that SA has already slid far down that slope.