HARARE – Zimbabwe’s troubled coalition government marks its second
anniversary today and although it is credited with mending a broken economy,
talk of it winding down to allow elections sometime this year has stoked
fears of a resurgence in violence that swept the last poll in 2008.
The troubled southern African country has witnessed a spate of politically
motivated violence in suburbs in the capital Harare and President Robert
Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s parties are exchanging blame
for the skirmishes.
The unity government, which was brokered by former South African president
Thabo Mbeki, was meant to heal political wounds after a cycle of electoral
violence, which critics say mostly targeted Mugabe’s rivals in the
opposition and civil society.
Ordinary Zimbabweans who had seen their country return to normal in the last
24 months, including GDP growth and an end to shortages of food, fuel and
foreign exchange, now dread that another election will roll back the
economic gains brought about by the coalition and return the country to
violence.
They may not be wrong, after ZANU-PF supporters attacked their MDC opponents
in the last two weeks, which culminated in looting of a downtown shopping
complex in Harare by youths supporting Mugabe’s controversial empowerment
programme on Tuesday.
“All the two years of peace we had enjoyed will go to waste if we have
another election and already with these reports of violence in the suburbs
it doesn’t look good,” said Tawanda Makarau, a 36-year-old who operates a
flea market stall in downtown Harare.
At the flea market, a huge campaign poster of Mugabe adorns the entrance and
Makarau said ZANU-PF youths had forcibly put it there.
The unity government has hobbled along, with tensions between Mugabe and
Tsvangirai over how to equally share executive power.
Mugabe has rejected MDC demands to swear-in its treasurer general Roy Bennet
and five of its members as provincial governors and has refused to fire
central bank chief and financial adviser Gideon Gono and attorney general
Johannes Tomana, who has publicly said he is a ZANU-PF card carrying member.
Mugabe, on his part accuses the MDC of not doing enough to convince Western
countries to remove a European Union travel ban and financial freeze on his
close allies and United States sanctions and that he would not yield to the
MDC demands until the sanctions are removed.
Police Complicit
Critics say the unity government has failed to end human rights abuses and
to reform the security services, whose top brass has vowed that it will only
recognize Mugabe as president.
The MDC accuses police of complicit in the recent spate of violence that has
gripped the capital but the law enforcement agents have hit back, saying the
former opposition party is responsible for the violence but rushes to play
victim.
“Such unlawful actions (political violence) violate the Global Political
Agreement and demonstrate that the undermining of the rule of law has not
changed fundamentally,” the United States embassy in Harare said in a
statement yesterday, in which it said it was alarmed by the violence.
State-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and other government-owned
media, which are pro-Mugabe, have said the unity government expires today
and that Tsvangirai, Mugabe and Arthur Mutambara (who represents a splinter
MDC faction but has been rejected by that formation) will meet to decide
whether to extend its life.
Mugabe has previously said he was reluctant to prolong the tenure of the
coalition and wants elections this year even before a referendum on a new
constitution but the process is nearly a year behind.
Under the global political agreement, which was signed in September 2008,
the leaders of the three political parties in the unity government will meet
after a new constitution has been adopted to decide whether to continue or
call elections.
Under the original timeline a referendum would have been held last month.
"If we start talking about elections the first thing that comes to people's
minds is the trauma they went through in 2008," said Okay Machisa, director
of Zimbabwe Human Rights Association.
"We should (instead) be talking about reforms in the security sector, the
media and electoral systems," he added.
Military Deploys
Already the MDC says hundreds of its members have fled their homes after
attacks from ZANU-PF supporters in urban centres, the party’s stronghold and
are being put in safe houses.
Investigations by ZimOnline have shown the military deploying in the rural
areas in large numbers ahead of elections and last week senior military
officers, including Air Force Vice Air Marshal Henry Muchena, a staunch
Mugabe ally who is now heading the executive in the ZANU-PF commissariat,
resigned from their posts, to lead Mugabe’s re-election campaign.
Mugabe lost to Tsvangirai in the March 2008 presidential vote after his
ZANU-PF party surrendered its parliamentary majority to the MDC for the
first time in a parallel election but the veteran leader, who turns 87 in
two weeks, managed to cling on after a violent campaign during a run-off,
which Tsvangirai withdrew from.
With the economy in turmoil, marked by inflation of more than 500 billion
percent and refugees flooding into big neighbour South Africa, Mugabe was
forced by his peers in the Southern African Development Community into a
coalition with Tsvangirai.
Now ZANU-PF, which during the power-sharing talks wanted the unity
government to last five years, says the marriage cannot be allowed to
continue and elections should be held this year.
“Any election that is held before a new constitution or security and
electoral reforms will be just another sham and will be more violent than
what we saw in 2008,” John Makumbe, a political science lecturer at the
University of Zimbabwe said.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network said in a report last month that
almost a third of the names appearing on Zimbabwe's voters roll were of
people who had died.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has previously said it was not ready for
an election this year. -- ZimOnline
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