Zimbabwe annonces runoff election

NY Times:

After more than a month’s delay, Zimbabwe officially announced the results of the March 29 presidential elections on Friday, saying that the opposition candidate had won but by not enough to avoid a runoff against President Robert Mugabe.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, won 47.9 percent of the vote, compared with Mr. Mugabe’s 43.2 percent, the electoral commission’s chief elections officer, Lovemore Sekeramayi, told reporters.

Ministers in Mr. Mugabe’s government had maintained for weeks that a runoff would be necessary against Mr. Tsvangirai.

But it was unclear how the opposition — which maintains that it won a majority, eliminating the need for a runoff — would react. The delay in publishing the results had fanned the country’s deepening and increasingly violent political crisis, and led to widespread accusations that Mr. Mugabe was trying to manipulate the outcome and ward off a defeat for him and his ruling party, ZANU-PF.

“This whole thing is a scandal, scandalous daylight robbery and everyone knows that,” Nelson Chamisa, an opposition spokesman, told Reuters. “We won this election outright, and yet what we are being given here as the outcome are some fudged figures meant to save Mugabe and ZANU-PF."

In advance of the announcement Friday, the opposition, church leaders and human rights groups reported increasing violence and intimidation against opposition supporters, often asserting that a slow-motion coup was underway in Zimbabwe, with the security forces exerting ever greater sway.

Human Rights Watch has accused the army of providing supporters of ZANU-PF with arms and trucks for a campaign of violence against the opposition. The Movement for Democratic Change has said that 20 of its members have been killed by pro-government militias since the election.

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After a month of violence Human Rights Watch finally notices. I am sure they are disappointed they can't blame the US for the mess Mugabe has made of his country. This violence has already made a fair runoff election unlikely. They have chased many of the supporters of the opposition from the country and and put many of the ones who did not get away into the hospital if they were lucky enough to make to one and lucky enough not to be beaten again once they got there.

The chances of a fair runoff election are remote.