IRIN Focus on election monitoring controversy

With just days to go before Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections this weekend, local and international observers have expressed concern at the level of intimidation and violence and an accreditation process that has caused delays and prevented some observers from monitoring polls. In separate interviews with IRIN, the former Nigerian leader, Abdulsalami Abubakar, who heads a 44-member Commonwealth observer team, and Pierre Schori, a former Swedish government minister who leads a team of 150 observers from the European Union (EU), said their teams had received reports of violence and intimidation almost on a daily basis. But they also said the presence of international observers in clearly marked vehicles had served to curtail some of the rural violence which has claimed 31 lives, mostly of opposition supporters, since the government of President Robert Mugabe lost a national referendum on land and constitutional reform in February. Candidates will be contesting 120 of the 150 parliamentary seats. The remaining 30 seats will go to candidates appointed by Mugabe. Local observers still await accreditation Meanwhile, local election observers representing NGOs such as church and civic society groups said they were still waiting to be given clearance to monitor the elections at 6,000 voting stations across the country on Saturday and Sunday. “We are by far the largest group of observers, and we have been running two-day workshops for hundreds of our people since January, yet they still await their accreditation from the authorities,” Tamsanqa Mlilo, the regional coordinator in the southern Matabeleland land office of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association told IRIN on Wednesday. “We are nevetheless optimistic that we will get our accreditation.” Representatives of the association said there had been widespread violence in rural Matabeleland, where young people, confronted with a local unemployment rate of close to 76 percent were growing impatient. And whatever the result, they feared violence after the election. They cited cases of beatings, violence against women, and threats of further violence if rural peasants vote the “wrong way”. “Our biggest concern is what will happen afterwards,” said Felix Mafa, an association field officer in Bulawayo. He said said that 10 - 15,000 people had been forced to flee their homes in recent weeks in Matabeleland. “We would have more accurate figures if people were less afraid to come forward. In this atmosphere it is difficult to say how free and fair this elections will be. The electoral legislation is in a shambles and there is every opportunity for vote rigging, if the intimidation has not been sufficient. People are fed up, scared and frustrated.” Should the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) win the elections, the association said there would be a “great” temptation to declare the vote “free and fair”. Should the ruling ZANU-PF party win, Mlilo had little doubt frustrated young people would react violently. “The whole process is being conducted in an atmosphere of mistrust and misinformation,” he said. In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s bustling second city, the association said that in the past two weeks, there had been a marked increase in the number of soldiers with red berets patrolling the streets. Although their numbers had since dwindled, Mlilo said their presence, especially outside urban areas of Matabeleland, had sent a “wave of fear through a population which has not forgotten the killings here in the 1980s carried out by the army’s 5th brigade which also wore red berets”. The international observers The leaders of the two international teams monitoring the elections said it was with these factors in mind that they felt it important to show their presence in Matabeleland with personal visits to Bulawayo and some of the outlying disctricts. “We are here to try and talk to as many people as we can,” Abubakar told IRIN during a two-day stopover on Tuesday. “From every political party we talk to I get reports of intimidation and violence by their opponents and this has certainly given us cause for concern. People are beaten up, and this comes from all parties. Each points a finger at the other.” He said he had personally advised President Mugabe and the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and their officials that “they should be conducting this elections in a manner which makes their citizens feel comfortable”. “Our mandate is to report truly and fairly without fear or favour and President Mugabe has given us the liberty to operate freely,” the leader of the Commonwealth delegation said. Several international observers refused accreditation Pierre Schori told IRIN that more than a score of international observers had so far been refused accreditation by the Zimbabwe authorities. They include 17 Nigerian and Kenyan observers whom he had invited to join his EU team, some members of the Strasbourg-based European Parliament, some Norwegian monitors, an eight-member team from the National Democratic Institute in Washington, as well as a South African group. The government said their applications would be reconsidered if their national governments applied for accreditation on their behalf. It also said the Nigerians and Kenyans had been “planted” by Britain, the former colonial power. Commenting on the issue in an editorial on Wednesday, the local official daily, ‘The Chronicle’, said: “Zimbabweans should disabuse themselves of any naivety and realise that foreign governments which tried to infiltrate ‘observers’ into this country did not do so for love of this nation, but rather to try to manufacture faults so as to damn the elections and with that, the Zimbabwean Government. “It is obvsiously to try to achieve the same objective, on behalf of the enemy without, that its local agents have embarked on orgies of provocations and destruction of property,” the newspaper said. Schori said those so far refused accreditation were still awaiting a change of heart and he said the Zimbabwe election was the first time in monitoring such polls in many countries that he had found observers required to get official accreditation. An initial report expected early in the week The head of the EU group said he would publish an interim report on the fairness of the elections late on Sunday or early on Monday, once the voting is over. He said it would address technical and political issues. He said he had been receiving daily reports from the 150 members of his team from across the country, and that the intimidation and violence had to be condemned. “We are deeply concerned about this. I think that in 20 years of independence after a heroic struggle for liberation, the time has come for exchanging sticks and bullets for the secrecy of the ballot and the power of the people to express themselves freely and in secret through their vote,” Schori said. Abubakar said he hoped the politicians would accept the outcome of the elections gracefully: “My advice is that they should think about their citizens,” he said.