IRIN Focus on EU election verdict

The European Union has criticised the Zimbabwe parliamentary elections as seriously flawed following months of violence, intimidation and last-minute changes to the electoral process. Presenting the first independent assessment of the weekend election, Pierre Schori, head of the EU observer mission, told a news conference in the early hours on Monday: “It is clear from the daily and weekly assessments made by EU observers in every part of the country that there were serious flaws and failures in the electoral process.” As the country awaited the outcome of the vote in which officials said more than 3 million of the country’s 5.1 million registered voters participated, diplomats and local analysts told IRIN they feared violence, whatever the result. Late on Sunday night and on Monday morning police had set up road blocks at some strategic points in and around the capital, Harare. A lack of transparency The EU mission of 190 monitors - the largest team of international observers - will remain in Zimbabwe for at least another week. Schori said that although they had been “warmly welcomed” since their arrival in early June, they had found that the body running the election, the Office of the Registrar-General, had not operated in an open and transparent manner and failed to secure the confidence of political parties and civil society institutions. “The Electoral Supervisory Commission (ESC), which is constitutionally responsible for overseeing the electoral process, was systematically rendered ineffective by both legal and administrative means,” Schori said. He added that the government of President Robert Mugabe had also failed to uphold the rule of law in the electoral process. “We would like to remind President Mugabe, as I have in person, that high office bears high responsibility,” Schori said. Thousands of local observers turned away The EU observers had slept overnight on Saturday and Sunday at 1,700 of the country’s 4,000 polling stations to ensure there had been no tampering with ballot boxes, and on the whole, Schori noted they reported “positively” on the actual voting which was conducted without violence. But he said, 16,000 local monitors had been barred from monitoring the election soon after the voting started on Saturday, raising “another serious question”. John Garwe, a spokesman for the local observers trained by the ESC and other civic rights groups said police had evicted the local observers because they did not have accreditation papers. Schori, a member of the European Parliament and a former Swedish government minister said the problems with accreditation days before the vote “together with a series of deliberate administrative obstructions, severely undermined” the ability of domestic monitors to watch the polling. “The EU Election Observation Mission reached the conclusion that this was not due to administrative incompetence, but to a deliberate attempt to reduce the effectiveness of independent monitoring of the election,” he said. “Similar obstructions were placed in the way of international observers.” The government view The national chairman of the ruling ZANU-PF party, John Nkomo, reacted at a news conference by saying the ESC was not an impartial body because it had trained and deployed monitors with allegiance to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “In our view, it is illegal for election monitors under the ESC to be affiliated to a political party or an organisation that is affiliated to a political party,” Nkomo said. He also said that the number of monitors at each polling station had been restricted to four, and because this number had been exceeded in some cases, it had caused “confusion as to whom is supposed to be doing what”. The violence and intimidation Meanwhile, Schori also said high levels of violence, intimidation and coercion had marred the election campaign. The EU mission found that the ruling party had been responsible for most of it. “ZANU-PF leaders seemed to sanction the use of violence and intimidation against political opponents and contributed significantly to the climate of fear so evident during the election campaign,” he said. “Calls for peaceful campaigning and efforts to restrain party supporters, including the war veterans, were often ambiguous. Overall the conduct of the government has failed to uphold the rule of law and compromised law enforcement agencies.” He said MDC supporters had also engaged in violence and intimidation, but that the degree of their responsibility for it was far less. MDC leaders were also “clearer” in their condemnation of the violence. Although the violence had not been absent from Zimbabwe’s cities, “in many rural areas the levels of intimidation by ZANU-PF were so intense as to make it virtually impossible for the opposition to campaign”. Media coverage biased The EU mission also said the state-run radio and television broadcasters failed to provide equal access to parties contesting the election, and that they had been used as “publicity vehicles” for the ruling party. The opposition parties were only able to rely on independent newspapers to get their message across. The voting process Schori said that the voting had been calm and well organised, and that the EU observers overall assessment of the voting at the weekend was “highly positive”. He said the EU would make its assessment of the counting at a later stage. The responsibility of Mugabe and the courts Reminding his audience that the EU is the largest contributor of development aid to Zimbabwe, Schori said the assessment provided on Monday was an interim one and that a full assessment would be presented to the executive Commission of the EU and the European Parliament on 3 July. The violence he said had to be condemned, and the courts should deal with all cases of human rights abuses as part of an essential process of re-establishing respect for the rule of law in Zimbabwe. Serious defects with the voters roll and the lack of transparency of the electoral authorities had to be addressed as a mater of urgency, Schori added.