IWPR - March 31st, 2005

Victims of Mugabe's land seizures lacked the official documents necessary to vote in ballot.

By Chipo Sithole in Harare

Tens of thousands of former workers on white-owned farms were deprived of their votes in the March 31 parliamentary election.

Some 350,000 black workers and their families were rendered homeless from 2000 onwards when President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF government embarked on a chaotic programme of forcible expulsion of white owners from some 4500 commercial farms.

The workers, who were expelled from their homes on farms along with their employers, have been living in dire poverty in makeshift camps across the country. Because of the way they were summarily uprooted, they did not have the necessary wad of official documents required to register as voters. In addition, many could not afford to travel to their original farm constituencies to verify their details on voters’ rolls.

The government demands that potential voters provide proof of residence before they can register. Rural Zimbabweans either produce letters from their headman or chief or from their farm employer as proof of residence.

Of the 350,000 farm workers and their families, only about 10,000 were given land in the post-expulsion redistribution programme. MPs, civil servants, party officials, army and police officers and judges were the main recipients of confiscated farms.

The former labourers who received nothing are scattered in squatter camps or low-paid town jobs. Some are living on paltry wages paid by the new elite black farmers who took over from commercial farmers.

Moses Chembe, 45, was displaced from a farm at Beatrice, 80 kilometres south of Harare, where he was a tractor driver. “My wife and I will not vote because we were unable to register,” he told IWPR. “The officers from the registrar’s office told us to go back to our original constituency. But how could we go back when we were chased from the farm? The war veterans [Mugabe’s main occupation force] told us vacate the farm.”

The Chembes now live in a squatter camp near Arcturus Mine, a mining town 35 km east of Harare.

“When I protested to the registrar that we had been displaced, his officers told me to bring my proof of new residence or a letter from the chief,” said Chembe.

Documents regarded as proof of residence include water, electricity or phone bills. Unfortunately, Chembe has not been able to produce any such documents because he lives at a squatter camp where there are no municipal amenities.

Chembe now works for a new black farmer on a contract basis.

He is paid 15, 000 Zimbabwe dollars (about two US dollars) for an 8 hour shift, with no perks or accommodation. In Zimbabwe, his salary can only buy three loafs of bread. During the off-season, when there is no contract word, Chembe sells wild fruits at the roadside to try to keep his family.

Countless thousands of other farm workers have been similarly disenfranchised and impoverished.

Ganizani Phiri, 68, told IWPR he lost his job when a senior army officer expelled his white employer from his farm at Macheke, 160 km southeast of Harare. “I have voted in every election since Independence in 1980,” he said angrily. “This is the first time I will not be able vote. And it’s all because I was forcibly moved from my constituency.”

Phiri is now also a contract worker with “new farmers". “I would have liked to go back to Macheke to try to register, but I just can’t afford it. The new farmers are paying me only 15,000 Zimbabwe dollars a shift. That can’t get me anywhere. I can’t even feed my wife and six children and grandchildren properly,” he added.

The General and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe,GAPWUZ, said it is difficult to place an exact figure on the number of displaced farm workers who have been disenfranchised. GAPWUZ deputy secretary general Gift Muti told IWPR that the number was likely to be just under 400, 000.

He said the union’s biggest immediate challenge was to make sure that the few workers who were lucky enough to be allocated land get title deeds so that they can at least vote in the next election.

The ZANU PF government has repeatedly accused the farm workers of siding with commercial farmers during the land reform invasion process.

In 2000, the government lost its bid to change the constitution in a referendum. The new constitution sought to legalise the takeover of land from the white commercial farmers. Zimbabweans rejected the new proposal with an ovewhelming "No" vote that shocked Mugabe.

He blamed the commercial farmers and their workers for the defeat. Instead, he launched the farm invasions which robbed the white farmers of their land and their workers of their homes.

“The government believes that the farm employees voted against the proposed constitution in 2000,” said Paul Themba-Nyathi, spokesman for the opposition MDC. “Mugabe also believes the workers voted for the MDC in the last two elections. That is why they were determined not to allow them to vote this time around.”

Chipo Sithole is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

Authorities' expected manipulation of votes of people registered twice or known to be dead likely to secure ZANU PF triumph.

By Josephine Ushe in Harare

Zimbabweans waited in long lines on March 31 to vote in their country’s sixth parliamentary election, knowing that two factors beyond their control could decide the nation’s fate – the so-called “zombie vote” and President Robert Mugabe’s personal power to appoint one in every five members of parliament without an electoral test.

Some 5.7 million adults in a total population of 11.5 million people - excluding 3.5 million political and economic refugees outside Zimbabwe’s borders - are registered to vote. But between one and two million of those voters, according to different estimates, are zombie voters, people known to be dead or who have been registered twice.

Opposition politicians and human rights organisations, who were denied the right to inspect the voter registration lists by the ruling ZANU PF government, believe it is these phantom ballots that will be most spectacularly manipulated by Mugabe’s officials to secure a ZANU PF victory.

Among those registered to vote on March 31 are Richard Tichaona Chiminya, Talent Mabika and David Stevens. But all three are dead, and their terrible deaths were widely reported in the international media. The opposition, for certain, will not be able to cast Chiminya’s, Mabika’s and Stevens’ votes because all the election officials are ZANU PF and military loyalists appointed by Mugabe.

Amnesty International reported that Chiminya and Mabika were activists for the opposition MDC killed by top ZANU PF officials in 2002 during a presidential election campaign.

The Amnesty report, entitled “The toll of impunity”, said the red Mazda truck in which the two MDC men were traveling near the town of Buhera was waved down by an official of the Central Intelligence Organisation and a leader of the ZANU PF-orientated War Veterans Association. The Mazda truck was doused in petrol and set ablaze: Chiminya and Mabika were burned to death. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa quashed the prosecution of the two assailants. “The CIO officer alleged to be one of the killers remains on active duty,” said the human rights organisation.

Stevens was one of the first white farmers to die at the hands of ZANU PF activists when Mugabe authorised by decree the invasion of white-owned farms throughout Zimbabwe. Stevens’ “Arizona Farm” outside the small town of Marondera was invaded by Mugabe’s war veterans who drove the farmer’s workers from their homes on the property. Stevens was then taken into deep bush where he was beaten with rocks, sticks and metal rods before being executed with a bullet through the back of his head.

The MDC estimates that there are only 3.2 million genuine voters on the electoral rolls – which means, if true, that, besides Stevens, Mabika and Chiminya, there are another 2.5 million zombie voters. A more conservative estimate, by political scientists at the University of Zimbabwe, is that they total just over one million – enough, if votes are cast for them, to swing the election decisively.

FreeZim Support Group, an Harare-based democracy advocacy organisation, won a court action last October which enabled its officials to remove three truckloads of pages containing voters’ names. An analysis of 7000 names of dead people in 14 constituencies discovered that nearly 5,500 were still on the rolls.

In the two major cities voting on March 31 proceeded peacefully compared with the last parliamentary election in 2000 when there was widespread violence in which many people died or were maimed for life. The situation in the countryside is unclear, but there was one confirmed serious attack by ZANU PF activists on a young woman election observer from a South African church group.

South African parliamentary observer Roy Jankielson, an MP for the opposition Democratic Alliance, said the woman, whose name is known to the DA, was indecently assaulted and robbed by six ZANU PF men who boarded a bus carrying observers and other passengers between Harare and Marondera. “They forced everyone on the bus to chant ZANU PF slogans,” said Jankielson. “The South African woman was singled out as she does not speak the local [Shona] language . She was assaulted and robbed by the young men. The matter has been reported to the South African embassy in Harare.”

Although violence is hugely reduced compared with previous elections, Zimbabweans were still casting their votes in an atmosphere of sufficient fear that exit polls typical of most modern democratic elections were impossible.

The outcome is so uncertain that diplomats and analysts are predicting multiple post-election scenarios – from only 35 of the 120 elected seats for the MDC to 85. To secure a majority, the MDC needs to win 76 of the 120 elected seats, because Mugabe appoints 30 people directly as MPs.

In 2000, the MDC won 57 seats, a surprisingly strong showing in its first election contest.

“This is an election where I think any result is possible,” said Brian Kogoro, chairman of the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, a network of civil society organisations.

But a western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “If this was a free and fair process, there would be an MDC tidal wave. The biggest concern is a manipulation of the voter rolls. A lot of tombstones will be voting.”

Josephine Ushe is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

MDC leader gives followers barely disguised signal to overthrow government.

By Benedict Unendoro in Harare

Zimbabwe and the southern Africa region has been plunged into deep crisis after opponents of President Robert Mugabe conceded on April 1 that the ruling ZANU PF party was on its way to a crushing two-thirds majority parliamentary election victory.

However, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition MDC, said the victory had been achieved as a result of massive and widespread electoral fraud by Mugabe and ZANU PF. Tsvangirai gave a barely disguised signal to his followers to begin extra-parliamentary action to topple a government that has presided over seven years of economic collapse, widespread violence, massive unemployment and inflation, hunger and spreading disease.

“These elections cannot be accepted by anyone in their right mind,” an angry Tsvangirai told reporters in Harare. “This is disgusting massive fraud.

“I am asking people to defend their right to vote. We have been using the legal route and that route has failed. We are not going to use it this time.”

Tsvangirai was referring to the last parliamentary election in 2000 when, despite massive government violence which resulted in many deaths and countless maimings among the opposition, the MDC won 57 of the 120 parliamentary seats. In subsequent actions in the supreme court, more than twenty ZANU PF victories were overturned as fraudulent, giving the MDC a parliamentary majority.

But the supreme court verdicts were held up for five years in the appeal court, staffed by judges loyal to Mugabe and who had been given properties confiscated from white commercial farmers in the post-2000 anarchic government-inspired upheavals. Those electoral appeals are still stuck in the supreme court and, following the March 31 general election, have become null and void.

What Tsvangirai plans in place of the legal route, which many of his top officials previously acceded to only reluctantly, is not yet clear. One near-certainty is that MDC MPs will not this time take their seats or salaries in a parliament seen as totally subverted and corrupted by Mugabe and ZANU PF.

Tsvangirai, widely criticised for his weak leadership, may have to consent to the calls of leaders of civil society for an attempted revolution similar to those of Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Prime among these civic voices has been that of Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, who predicted the poll would be heavily rigged.

Before Easter Sunday mass last weekend in Bulawayo Cathedral, the Archbishop said, "I hope that people get so disillusioned that they really organise and kick him [Mugabe] out by a non-violent, popular mass uprising ... People should pluck up just a bit of courage and stand up against him and chase him away."

Tsvangirai admitted the impending defeat at a moment on April 1 when the MDC had won 30 of the first 38 constituencies to declare. But they were all safe opposition seats in the three major urban centres of Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare. His MDC advisers decided they must pre-empt the final outcome when party supporters reported massive intimidation and ballot stuffing in the key rural areas of Mashonaland and Masvingo, the heartland of traditional Shona tribal support for ZANU PF. In an electorate of 5.7 million, some one to two million “zombie votes” of dead people still on the ZANU PF-controlled electoral register are believed to have been cast.

Among many other electoral fraud weapons, human rights organisations, opposition supporters and media analysts said the application of sheer fear during this election campaign was the most powerful and subtle, especially in Shona rural areas.

Poverty-stricken peasants were warned by communal chiefs that their agricultural plots would be repossessed if a single MDC vote was found in the ballot boxes.

It may be a mystery to the outside world how ZANU PF can impose such a draconian hold on its rural people. It is doubtful that the majority of them support ZANU PF, but, more than their urban relatives, they have borne the brunt of Mugabe’s mismanagement of the country. It is in these rural areas that such necessities as bread, sugar and the staple maize are either available through ZANU PF officials or not obtainable at all.

Until last year, international non-government organisations such as Oxfam, Care International and World Vision donated basic food for survival, but they were expelled by Mugabe who said they were supporting the MDC, leaving the government as the sole guardian and distributor of food supplies.

During the last election campaign these rural areas were subjected to heavy intimidation and violence by ZANU PF men who had also coerced the same population during the 1970s war of liberation against Zimbabwe’s former white Rhodesian government.

That war and the events of 2000 are still implanted in the folk memories of the rural people of Shona tribal lands, where the majority of Zimbabweans live. Intimidation was as a rife as ever during the election campaign, but it went unnoticed by foreign observer teams and journalists who hung around the cities rather than penetrating the less comfortable and more dangerous countryside.

In Shona rural areas, ZANU PF commissars had long ago divided the people into cells of 500 each and placed one polling station in the territory of each cell. All the ZANU PF militants and the Green Bombers, Mugabe’s personal storm troopers from the National Youth Militia, then had to do was to tell each and every largely illiterate peasant, whose traditional loyalty is to the local chief, to go to the polling station in their cell or ward. The chilling message delivered, out of sight and earshot of election observers and the foreign press, was that the community as a whole would bear responsibility if a single MDC vote was found in the ballot box.

The implication was that extreme violence would follow on the whole community from the Green Bombers and ZANU PF organisers if an MDC vote appeared. Control was easy because vote counting was carried out at the polling station under pro-Mugabe police and army officers. Among other threats available to chiefs and headmen, who allocate communal lands for agriculture, was withdrawal of plots essential for bare survival of the peasantry.

Many details of the massive fraud employed by Mugabe will emerge in coming weeks, but the above was the main method, long planned, by which he secured his huge victory.

“Five-and-half years of savagery have left a legacy of fear,” said Andrew Moyse, head of Zimbabwe’s Media Monitoring Service, one of the country’s few surviving human rights organisations. “Violence this time only needed to be implied. If you beat a dog every day for five years there comes a time when all you need to do is show him the stick and he will do as he is told.”

By late April 1, ZANU PF was well on its way to a two-thirds majority which will allow Mugabe to change the constitution and strengthen his iron rule. Meanwhile, the South African parliamentary observer delegation, the most influential of the observer groups permitted to enter Zimbabwe, was preparing to issue a statement declaring the 2005 Zimbabwe parliamentary election free and fair, as instructed in advance by South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Benedict Unendoro is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's opposition said on Wednesday it had discovered ``serious and unaccountable gaps'' in vote tallies which prove its charges President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party rigged last week's parliamentary election.

Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Changesaid its crushing defeat was hardly surprising because all the country's electoral institutions were controlled by Mugabe loyalists.

In a statement, the MDC said preliminary investigations had revealed gaps between official vote tallies given by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and total votes attributed to candidates in 30 constituencies -- a quarter of the 120 seats contested.

``This indicates massive electoral fraud by the ruling party,'' it said, echoing the view of Western powers who dismissed the election as a charade.

A statement by the U.S. embassy in Harare also said there were irregularities in almost the entire polling process, including vote counting in which it charged police and ZANU-PF agents ``appeared to have made an improper role.''

``Of particular concern was lack of transparency in the tabulation of vote counts,'' it said, adding that the commission had not explained the discrepancies in figures and why at some polling stations up to 30 percent of voters were turned away. The ZEC was not available for comment on Wednesday, while ZANU-PF has denied rigging the vote. African observers have said the poll was free and fair.

The ruling party swept 78 of the 120 seats up for grabs in the March 31 poll.

The MDC managed only 41 seats -- down by 10 seats from its strength in the dissolved assembly and 16 short of what it won in the 2000 parliamentary vote before it lost some in by-elections.

ZANU-PF thus won a two-thirds majority in the 150-member parliament as 30 seats are constitutionally reserved for Mugabe appointees. One seat went to an independent.

``WIDESPREAD IRREGULARITIES''

The MDC said it had proof of fraud in 30 constituencies in four provinces for which the electoral commission had provided all figures for votes cast.

The fact that the commission had given only partial figures for another six provinces also supported suspicions of rigging, it added.

``The ZEC's refusal to release these figures indicates widespread irregularities,'' it said, adding however that the cheating did not cover the MDC's urban strongholds.

``This raises further suspicions that there was a calculated plan to ensure that the MDC won a sufficient number of seats to provide the electoral process, and end result, with a veneer of legitimacy,'' it said.

In Zimbabwe's eastern Mutare south constituency, final results showed 28,575 ballots were cast while ZEC officials had said only 14,045 people had voted, the MDC said.

In Manyame constituency near the capital Harare, which was won by one of Mugabe's nephews, Patrick Zhuwao, the ZEC initially gave a total vote of 14,812 but the final result showed 24,303 people had cast their ballots, leaving 9,491 votes in question, the MDC said.

The comparison of the figures could not immediately be independently confirmed.

Mugabe and his ZANU-PF have rejected accusations of rigging this vote or the last parliamentary polls five years ago and a presidential ballot in 2002 as charged by the opposition and many Western observers.

The MDC said it had handed its evidence to poll observers from both the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and from Zimbabwe's powerful neighbor South Africa, which have both endorsed the March elections fair.

``This election was stolen. The results are in no way an accurate reflection of the sovereign wishes of the people of Zimbabwe,'' it said.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, supported by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, has compiled an initial list of 30 constituencies where it argues there was massive ballot stuffing after polls closed on March 31.

The problematic constituencies identified to date are located in the provinces of Manicaland, Mashonaland West, Mashonaland East and Matabeleland South, where the MDC says there are serious and unaccountable discrepancies between the data recorded by election officers at close of play and the final tallies announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, ZEC, on April 1.

“This indicates massive electoral fraud by the ruling party,” said the MDC in a statement on April 9.

“Where the MDC was widely predicted to retain its seats, as in the two major cities of Harare and Bulawayo, very few discrepancies were identified,” said an MDC spokesman. “This raises further suspicions that there was a calculated plan to ensure that the MDC won a sufficient number of seats to sanction the electoral process as free and fair in the eyes of invited foreign observers. It cleverly gave the end result a veneer of legitimacy. While little attempt was made to deny the MDC victory in key urban areas, it is clear that all the stops were pulled out to ensure the MDC made few gains elsewhere.”

The MDC said that in 11 constituencies - Kariba, Manyame, Goromonzi, Murehwa South, Mutoko North, Seke Rural, Buhera South, Mutare South, Mutasa South, Mutasa North and Nyanga – wins by ZANU PF are directly attributable to discrepancies between the March 31 and April 1 tallies.

In most of these constituencies, the winning candidate was either a senior ZANU PF party official or a government minister.

The spokesman said the MDC had not yet been able to carry out an analysis of the vote count in constituencies in Mashonaland Central, Masvingo, Matabeleland North, Midlands North and Midlands South as the election body has failed to make the data public. “The ZEC’s refusal to release these figures indicates widespread irregularities,” he said.

The MDC spokesman said its preliminary information and all later findings will be widely distributed internationally. A handful of cases may be taken to Zimbabwean courts in order to make the complaints a matter of public record, but there is little hope these claims will be considered. Thirty objections raised in the 2000 parliamentary election have still not been processed by the courts.

Constituencies where discrepancies were noted:

1 Manyame: The ZEC announced the total votes cast as 14, 812 on March 31. The MDC candidate was ahead with 8,312 votes. However, when results were announced on April 1, the ZANU PF candidate was reported to have won with 15,448 votes. The total vote becomes 24,303 (543 ballots were spoilt) – an increase of 9,491 on the initial tally.

2 Goromonzi: The ZEC initially put the vote count at 15,611, giving the MDC more than half the total, with 8,578 votes. But in final results issued the next day, the ZANU PF candidate was declared the winner with 16,782 votes – over 1,000 more than the original total. The total votes cast for the two candidates plus spoilt ballots are now put at 26,123, a discrepancy of 10,512.

3 Kariba: The initial count of 16,676 puts the MDC candidate ahead with 9,540 votes. Final results make ZANU PF the winner with 13,171 votes. The total vote count is now 24,142, or 7,466 more than the first figure.

4 Seke Rural: The total vote rose to 24,873 from an initial 11,344, an increase of a discrepancy is 13,529. The MDC’s initial win with 8,843 votes is transformed into a ZANU PF victory – the latter now has 15,434 votes, or 4,090 more votes than the initial figure for all votes.

5 Mutare South: With a total count of 14,054, the MDC is well ahead with 12,163 votes. But the final result gives ZANU PF a winning 16,412 of the new total, 28,575, a total that shows a discrepancy of 14,521.

6 Buhera South: The MDC candidate is initially awarded victory with 13,893 of a total 25,447 votes recorded. The revised results show ZANU PF winning with 15,066 votes. The total vote figure of 28,959 ballots represents a rise of 3,512.

7 Marondera East: An initial vote tally of 25,193 rises by 4,742 to reach 29,935. ZANU PF now has 19,192 votes as against 10,066 scored by the MDC.

8 Buhera North: Early tally of 16,795 goes up to 22,688, a discrepancy of 5,893. The increased total leaves the ZANU PF candidate with 17,677 votes compared with 4,137 for his MDC rival.

9 Murehwa South: The first ZEC total of 8,579 shoots up to 24,463 in the final data, a discrepancy of 15,207. The MDC’s 4,586 gave it a majority of the initial total, but the final count left ZANU PF the victor with 19,200.

10 Mutasa South: Out of the initially recorded 15,733 votes, the MDC got 9,380, more than half. Once the final results came out, the ZANU PF candidate was shown to have 9,715 votes. The total vote count, including spoilt ballots, amounts to 19,573, leaving 3,840 votes unaccounted for.

11 Mutasa North: The total ZEC figure for votes cast is 10,986. The MDC candidate polled 6,605 votes, more than half. But final results show the ZANU PF with 10,135. The total vote is now 17,204, leaving 6,218 votes unaccounted for.

12 Nyanga: The ZEC’s total is 13,896, of which the MDC candidate gets 9,360 votes. Revised results allot 12,612 to ZANU PF’s candidate. The total count, including spoilt ballots, is 22,739, or an additional 8,843 votes.

13 Chimanimani: The total ZEC figure for votes cast is 23,896. The MDC candidate received 11,031. When results were officially announced, ZANU PF was shown with 15,817 votes. The total count, including spoilt ballots, is put at 27,642, so 3,746 votes are unaccounted for.

14 Makoni North: The total votes cast here came to 14,068. However, at 24,987 the revised figure shows a discrepancy of 10,919 votes. The ZANU PF candidate has now won with 18,910, while the MDC gets 6,077.

15 Chipinge North: The ZEC first comes out with a vote count of 23,896. When results are finally issued, the ZANU PF candidate is announced the winner, with 16,047 votes against 10,920 for his MDC counterpart. The total vote count for the constituency now stands at 27,576, a discrepancy of 3,625.

16 Chipinge South: The ZEC total of 29,479 is revised upwards by 1,225 to 30,704. On April 1, ZANU PF is declared the winner, with 16,412 votes compared with 12,163 for the MDC and 2,129 for ZANU Ndonga.

17 Makoni East: The initial result of 20,454 for the total vote rises to 17,341, leaving a balance of 3,113 votes unaccounted for.

18 Beitbridge: The ZEC said 36,821 had voted but the totals for the candidates only add up to 20,602, leaving an unexplained gap of 16,219.

19 Hwedza: After announcing that 23,698 people had voted, the ZEC came out with a new total of 26,736, a difference of 3,038 votes.

20 Mutare West: The ZEC announced that 18,584 people had voted but the total for all candidates plus spoilt ballots comes to 20,950, in other words 2,366 more than the total.

21 Chegutu: The ZEC said 19,763 people voted yet the totals for candidates and spoilt ballots amount to 25,374, so that 5,611 extra votes have appeared.

22 Chikomba: According to the ZEC , the total count was 18,401 but the final tally is put 7, 649 higher at 26,050.

23 Hurungwe East: The total for two candidates is 26,552, or 4,019 votes more than the vote count given as 22,533.

24 Mudzi East: The vote count of 12,499 is 9,921 short of the votes given for all candidates, 22 420.

25 Mudzi West: The total of 10,998 people more than doubles to 22,796 when the final votes for all candidates are announced.

26 Murehwa North: There is a gap of 4, 747 between the initial count of 17,606 and the final tally of 22,353. ZANU PF gets 17,677, while the MDC scores 4,137.

27 Mutoko North: An initial voting figure of 10,721 is at odds with the final total of 20,652. The gap is 9,931. ZANU PF wins with 16,257 votes.

28 Mutoko South: ZANU PF wins with 19,390 out of a final total of 23,481. The latter figure is 7,618 higher than the initial count, recorded as 15,863.

29 Insiza: The initial total of 20,220 people is revised by 1,879 to 22,099. The final results give ZANU PF 13,109 ballots and the MDC 8,840.

30 Gwanda: While the ZEC initially said 23,288 people voted, the new total rises by 1,300 to 24,594. The winning ZANU PF candidate has 13,109 in the revised results, while the MDC has 10,961.

Domestic monitoring group allege major abuses ranging from intimidation to widespread ballot-stuffing.

By Dzikamayi Chidyausiku in Harare

Zimbabwe's leading domestic election monitoring organisation has condemned the conduct of the 2005 parliamentary poll, saying it was conducted in an atmosphere of fear and in defiance of regional guidelines for a free and fair ballot.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, ZESN, a grouping of 35 human rights organisations, said that in many constituencies, there were huge discrepancies between the number of votes recorded as cast and those finally published, suggesting ballot-stuffing or a simple manipulation of the data.

In the Manyame constituency, for example, said ZESN chairman Dr Richard Matchaba-Hove, an extra 10,000 votes appeared between the closing of the polls, when the number of votes cast was declared, and the announcement of the result.

The opposition MDC was expected to win the seat, southwest of Harare, but it unexpectedly went to the ruling ZANU PF party candidate, Patrick Zhuwawo, who is President Robert Mugabe's nephew.

Some 23,760 votes were finally declared as having been cast at Manyame.

But when the polls closed a few hours earlier, election officers said 14,812 people had voted. At this point, MDC candidate Hilda Mafuze had won 8,312 or 56 per cent of the votes cast, giving her an unassailable lead.

However, when the final verdict was announced centrally, the ZANU PF candidate got 15,448 votes or 65 per cent of the new total.

"I won, I was leading," said Mafudze. "Suddenly I hear about 24,000 votes being cast and I don't know where the extra 10,000 came from."

Human rights organisations and opposition parties have claimed that some one to two million dead people, so-called "zombie voters", were on electoral lists that were compiled by ZANU PF and that were not open to inspection by opposition candidates.

Zhuwawo is the son of Sabina Mugabe, the president's sister, who was herself elected in the nearby constituency of Norton, where she has taken over three farms confiscated from their white owners. They include Gowrie Farm where the farmer, Terry Ford, was bludgeoned and shot to death three years ago.

Similar discrepancies were noted in other constituencies. At Goromonzi, 48 kilometres east of Harare, the 15,611 votes recorded at close of polling on March 31 had shot up by 62 per cent to 25,360 when the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission came out with its final tally the following day. Here, too, the seat was taken by ZANU PF.

Matchaba-Hove said ZESN was still preparing its final comprehensive report, but results from Manyame, Goromonzi and many other constituencies had "serious implications on the credibility of the electoral process".

He said it was already clear that the election did not comply with the guidelines set out last August by the 14 heads of state of the Southern African Development Community, SADC, the most powerful regional grouping, for a free and fair election in Zimbabwe. President Mugabe was one of the 14 signatories.

ZESN believes that tens of thousands of people, perhaps as much as ten per cent of the electorate, were turned away from the polling booths. They were either told they had the wrong documentation or were in the wrong constituency.

"Official figures provided by the electoral commission indicate that the number of votes cast and those turned away by close of polling in six provinces totalled 130,000 or ten per cent of the voters [in those provinces]," said ZESN’s interim report.

"For instance, in Makoni East, where ZANU PF won by 9,201 votes compared to the MDC's 7,708, a total of 2,223 voters were turned away. In addition, in Mutasa South ZANU PF got 9,715 and MDC got 9,380 votes, while 1,460 voters were turned away. In both cases, the number of voters turned away was higher than the margin of victory."

Another concern raised by Matchaba-Hove was that opposition parties were not free to campaign "in certain parts of the country, as some of these were no-go areas for the opposition".

ZESN’s interim report said, "Traditional leaders [chiefs and village headmen] threatened their subjects with eviction and sometimes unspecified action should they fail to vote for the ruling party."

This claim was in accordance with evidence gathered by IWPR that the principal mechanism used to rig the ballot was the influence ZANU PF exerted over rural areas in Mashonaland, where the majority of the country’s population lives.

In these ethnically Shona areas, ZANU PF party officials had a longstanding practice of dividing the population into cells of 500 people, and for the election there was one polling station sited in each of these localities.

This structure allowed ZANU PF activists and the Green Bombers, members of Mugabe's National Youth Militia, to get residents to vote in their ward. Many in this rural population are illiterate and will follow instructions delivered by their local chief. Communal chiefs receive their salaries from the ZANU PF government.

In these areas, out of sight and earshot of election observers and the foreign press, the message conveyed was that the community as a whole would be held to account if MDC votes were found in the ballot box. One warning was that farmers would have their agricultural plots repossessed if members of their community voted the wrong way.

It is unclear how such communities would have voted had such pressure not been brought to bear on them. Rural groups have suffered more than their urban counterparts as the economy declines. In these areas, staples such as bread, sugar and maize are in short supply.

Part of ZANU PF’s power in the countryside comes from the fact that its officials are the conduit for food distribution.

Until last year, international non-government organisations such as Oxfam, Care International and World Vision donated basic food for survival, but they were expelled by Mugabe, who said they were supporting the MDC. That left the government as sole guardian and distributor of food supplies.

Another problematic area in this election was the constraints placed on media. ZESN noted that in direct contravention of a key SADC guideline, "there was no equal access to the media by political parties".

ZANU PF monopolised the print and electronic media. The MDC was given access to radio and TV, both entirely controlled by the state, on a limited basis and only for a few days close to polling day.

The MDC is claiming it would have won 94 of the 120 elected parliamentary seats if the election had been free and fair. Instead, it won 41 against ZANU PF's 78. One independent won a seat.

David Coltart, the party's legal affairs spokesman and a member of parliament, estimates that a quarter of million ZANU PF votes may have been stuffed into strategic ballot boxes after polls closed.

He said the MDC is preparing a report on widespread election fraud, including the "major disparities" between the voting numbers reported at close of polling and those announced later by the national electoral commission. The MDC has produced an initial list of 30 constituencies where it believes there was ballot stuffing.

“This analysis does not even take into account the uneven electoral playing field, the inflated voters’ roll, the coercion of the rural electorate, nor the high number of people who were turned away on polling day,” said an MDC spokesman.

All of the foreign observer teams, cherry-picked by President Mugabe because they were unlikely to raise concerns, have returned favourable reports on the conduct of the election. Observer teams from countries which were critical of the last election, such as those from the European Union, United States, Britain, Japan, Australia and the Commonwealth, were banned from entering the country.

The observer mission from SADC, which had laid down the guidelines for the election, said Mugabe had met these standards. "It is SADC's overall view that the elections were conducted in an open, transparent and professional manner," said a SADC spokesman.

Meanwhile, a row has broken out in the South African multi-party government delegation. This observer team was sent to Zimbabwe after South African president Thabo Mbeki had declared the election "free and fair" even before Zimbabweans had gone to the polls.

The delegation head, African National Congress, ANC, chief parliamentary whip Mbulelo Goniwe, declared the election "credible, legitimate, free and fair" within a few hours of the polls closing.

But three opposition members of parliament from the official South African opposition, the Democratic Alliance, and from the small Independent Democratic Party, broke ranks and accused Goniwe of a "blatant attempt to stifle debate and dissenting views on the crisis within Zimbabwe".

Noting that Goniwe had said he would not allow team members to issue a minority report, Independent Democrat Vincent Gore said, "Evidently the chief whip has little regard for values such as freedom of expression as enshrined in our constitution."

Democratic Alliance parliamentarian Dianne Kohler-Barnard said most of the observers picked by Mugabe had not actually left "their air-conditioned comfort zones to ask the tough questions at the grassroots level, and therefore could not declare these elections to have been free and fair."

Kohler-Barnard said she had broken away from the official group, and had travelled to most parts of the country. "I have satisfied myself that this sham of an election has been one of the most cynical frauds perpetrated on the international community in electoral history," she said.

Goniwe said he would introduce a motion in the South African parliament when it reconvenes to discipline the opposition members who left the official delegation, and who went against his instructions by not signing up to his consensus report affirming the fairness of the election.

In Cape Town, the official leader of the opposition, Tony Leon of the Democratic Alliance, said it was clear that "the South African government and the ANC went to Zimbabwe with the aim of declaring the election as 'free and fair', come what may, and with their report already pre-certified by President Thabo Mbeki".

Dzikamayi Chidyausiku is a pseudonym for an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Youngest MDC MP arrested amid reports of murder of a party activist and attacks on white farmers and their employees.

By Chipo Sithole in Harare

While Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Rome on April 8, back home a post-election crackdown on his domestic opponents was getting underway.

Just a week after Zimbabweans went to the polls – with international monitors and journalists once again out of the picture – police arrested the youngest MP from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, which won 41 out of 120 seats in an election that has been widely denounced as rigged.

There have also been reports of the murder of another MDC activist by supporters of Mugabe’s ZANU PF party and attacks on white farmers and their employees.

The arrest of Nelson Chamisa, the 26-year-old MP for the Harare constituency of Kuwadzana, only became known when he managed to send out text messages on his mobile phone to friends in the domestic media.

The messages suggested police and agents from the Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO, were torturing him.

“I am in trouble,” Chamisa wrote in one.

Chamisa was arrested on the afternoon of April 7 after being informed at a police roadblock that he was wanted in connection with a spate of anti-government demonstrations in central Harare on April 4.

Chamisa’s lawyer, Alex Muchadehama, said his client handed himself in and was initially detained in a central Harare police station before being transferred and held overnight in police cells at Matapi, in the Mbare township on the outskirts of the city. Muchadehama said the police intended to charge Chamisa with inciting public violence.

An appearance in the courts is likely on April 11.

“They are determined to torture him,” said Muchadehama. “I don’t see him being taken to court today or even at the weekend... [The] Matapi cells are very filthy and the transfer is a way of humiliating him.

“Why they are detaining him I just don’t understand… he surrendered himself and he won’t run away.”

The police cells at Matapi are renowned for being the filthiest in a country where prison conditions generally are grim.

Muchadehama said there were no signs of obvious physical injury when he met Chamisa briefly – but the MP looked dishevelled and disoriented, suggesting that some form or torture or intense interrogation had taken place.

The police are alleging that Chamisa organised young demonstrators who ran through the city centre stoning shop windows. During the alleged demonstration, the MDC youths apparently distributed pamphlets which said “Reject Fraud” and urged people not to accept the results of the parliamentary election.

Reports coming in from around the country suggest Chamisa’s arrest is part of a broader wave of post-election violence organised by the government against its political opponents.

In Kwekwe, about 160 kilometres southwest of Harare – where ZANU PF parliamentary speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa was defeated at the polls by MDC candidate Blessing Chebundo – a young MDC activist has been found dead, with his stomach slit open, after an alleged attack by ZANU PF supporters.

And on April 6, a security guard on a white-owned farm at Marondera, 80 km east of the capital, was beaten to death and the farmer himself was attacked by ZANU PF land invaders.

“ZANU PF have begun systematically hunting down people who voted for us and our election agents,” said the MDC’s secretary general Welshman Ncube. “The attacks started on Sunday, after the last result was announced. People have fled. Others are missing and no one knows what has happened to them.”

He added that he had heard reports of more attacks on the remaining 400 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe. There were 5000 such farms when President Mugabe first launched his strategy of land seizures before the last parliamentary election in 2000.

Chipo Sithole is the pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.

Opposition report says it would have won the election if it hadn’t been rigged.

By Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg

Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, has released a 56-page report outlining how it says President Robert Mugabe rigged recent parliamentary elections in favour of his own ZANU PF party.

The document, released on April 11 under the title “Stolen: How the elections were rigged”, claims that without such manipulation, the MDC would have won the vote.

“The MDC did not lose the election on March 31,” the party’s legal affairs spokesman David Coltart told reporters in Johannesburg. “The people of Zimbabwe lost the right to elect a government of their choice.”

Coltart said the election, in which ZANU PF secured 78 of 120 directly elected seats against the MDC’s 41, was rigged in multiple ways.

“The results do not reflect the will of the Zimbabwean people,” he said. “They reflect the will of the ruling party to have a two-thirds majority by whatever means necessary.”

“In short, the entire electoral process and the election itself fundamentally violated the Southern African Development Community [SADC] principles,” he added, in reference to a set of election guidelines set out by the fourteen heads of state of the SADC, the most powerful regional grouping, in the run-up to the vote.

The SADC leaders were acting in response to international criticism of Africa’s reluctance to insist that Mugabe conduct the election fairly.

The report claims that in six of Zimbabwe’s ten provinces nearly 134,000 people, most of them young people who mostly favour the MDC and comprising ten per cent of the electorate, were turned away from polling stations.

The MDC also alleges that there was widespread stuffing of ballot boxes between the closing of voting in polling stations and the announcement of results, after the Mugabe-controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission sampled votes and realized there was strong support for the opposition.

The document, which claims it was already obvious on the ground that Zimbabweans were ready for a new Zimbabwe and a new beginning, says the situation has now been “made worse by the brazen theft of the election”.

“If our demands [to reverse election results in twenty or more constituencies] are not met immediately, we will continue our struggle,” the MDC’s information secretary Paul Themba-Nyathi replied, when asked if the party was considering Ukrainian Orange Revolution-style street protests in an attempt to end Mugabe’s quarter century rule. “We will avail ourselves of all options available under Zimbabwe's constitution, as restrictive as they may be.”

"The people are with us,” he added. “We are going to mobilise on the ground, we are going to mobilise in the region.”

An MDC spokesman told IWPR that the report was distributed in Johannesburg as well as Harare because issuing it in the Zimbabwean capital alone would have been a non-starter.

“It’s unlikely the release would have attracted more than three journalists,” he said, “the one remaining independent foreign newspaper correspondent and two local pro-Mugabe newspapers who are entirely hostile to us.”

Fred Bridgland is IWPR’s Zimbabwe project editor based in Johannesburg.

In the wake of the election, some African leaders will feel they no longer have any obligation to increase democratic space.

By Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg

Africa passed through a major historic and developmental threshold, replete with huge dangers for the continent as a whole, following Zimbabwe’s recent parliamentary election.

It has become increasingly clear that yet again Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe managed to rig massively, with huge cunning and ruthlessness, the outcome of an election that has given him a two-thirds majority - which, in turn, permits him to change the constitution in any way he wishes.

He won 78 of the 120 directly elected seats - and appointed another 30 directly - in spite of having engineered an economy that is shrinking faster than any other on earth, accompanied by the world’s top inflation rate, which for a while topped 600 per cent.

It could be described as something of a miracle that he managed to secure a democratic landslide despite having given his people eighty per cent unemployment; food shortages that are causing deaths by starvation; and a collapsed health service that has seen life expectancy fall to 33 from 58 at independence and which is unable to help a population so widely infected with HIV that 500 Zimbabweans die each day of AIDS.

The fraudulent poll spells more disaster for ordinary Zimbabweans while enhancing the riches of the avaricious military men, corrupt civil servants and bent judges Mugabe has gathered into his inner circle.

However, analysts, journalists and a wide range of other people who care about Africa know that Zimbabwe’s election was less a test of Mugabe’s credibility and reputation – which are already beyond repair – than the standing of other leaders on the continent, and most particularly that of Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki, president of Zimbabwe’s powerful neighbour, South Africa, stunned the international community when a few days before the March 31 poll in Zimbabwe he proclaimed from the steps of parliament in Cape Town, “I have no reason to think that anybody in Zimbabwe will act in any way that will militate against the elections being free and fair.”

That paved the way for Mbeki’s labour minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, leader of the official South African government election observer mission, to declare the poll, which had yet to take place, free and fair within 30 minutes of his arrival in Zimbabwe.

Mdladlana told reporters in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, including local journalists who had been detained and beaten up by Zimbabwe’s police, that too many people had concluded in advance, unlike himself and his president, that the poll would not be free and fair. “Those people are a problem and a nuisance,” he said. “But nobody attacks them. Some of us are fed with their lies.”

Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, the country’s main opposition party, accused Mbeki and Mdladlana of taking partisan stances that are “an affront to the ideals that guided liberation struggles across Africa”.

Ncube added, “The South Africans have let us down. History will judge them very harshly indeed. They have sanitised the illegitimate regime of Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF. The South African government continues to go out of its way to act as the servant of ZANU PF repression against the Zimbabwean people’s struggle for democracy and freedom.”

What is extraordinary and puzzling about Mbeki’s stand, apart from the long-term damage it will cause South Africa, now shorn of its historic romantic gloss following the departure from the political scene of Nelson Mandela, is that he and other heads of state of the 14-member Southern African Development Community,SADC, southern Africa’s most important regional grouping, spent a huge amount of energy seven months ago drafting guidelines for free and fair elections at a summit in Mauritius.

The document was even signed by Mugabe, and it won worldwide acclaim.

Yet it is now clear it was all a charade. Mugabe had no intention of applying the guidelines. It is equally clear that neither Mbeki nor the other SADC leaders intended calling him to account. Cynical SADC governments can now exploit the gaping holes that Mugabe has driven through the protocol.

In the end, however, South Africa and the SADC are already paying the price in terms of lost credibility in the developed world, where they should have important roles to play in negotiating a better deal for the struggling nations of Africa and particularly for the legions of the poor.

The immediate obvious damage, following the rigged election, will be the collapse of enthusiasm for helping Africa at the G8 summit in Scotland in July and for British prime minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa. Few of these powerful governments will dare ask their electorates to take seriously all Mbeki’s rhetoric about an African renaissance. Far from having moved forward, Africa seems to have moved back a decade after Mugabe’s victory. A clutch of African leaders will read the signs and feel they no longer have any obligation to increase democratic space.

First in the queue will be Angola’s president Eduardo dos Santos who must hold parliamentary elections next year. It is a safe bet that he and his ruling MPLA party have watched events in Zimbabwe with interest and Mugabe’s box of tricks will look attractive to a party wanting to stay in power, especially knowing no one of any power in the region will ask difficult questions.

And the prime victim of this disaster - and it is a major disaster - will be Mbeki’s much touted doctrine of delivering good squeaky clean governance in Africa in return for better terms of trade with the developed world, debt relief and increased aid. Investment in South Africa - already slack because of the country’s bewilderingly complex ownership and licensing rules and the accompanying mountain of bureaucracy, together with Mbeki’s perplexing denial of the scale of his country’s AIDS crisis - will not accelerate.

Pius Ncube, the outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s nearest equivalent to South Africa’s renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has observed that Mbeki “would be booed in the streets” if he was ever to ask ordinary Zimbabweans what they thought about his views on their country. “The people of Zimbabwe have no respect for Mbeki. They don’t know why he is supporting Mugabe. They don’t understand it,” he said.

Asked what he thinks of Mugabe, the Archbishop said just before the election, “He’s a very, very evil man. The sooner he dies, the better.”

The assault on Mbeki, who is as prickly about criticism as Mugabe, does not only come from without. His South African Communist Party and Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cosatu, partners in the so-called tripartite governing alliance with the African National Congress are furious with the president. Both were refused permission by Mugabe to send observers to the election, and when a Cosatu delegation was manhandled and turned back from Harare after trying to meet fellow Zimbabwe trade unionists, the Cosatu leadership was condemned by the South African government for not respecting Zimbabwe law.

One South African newspaper columnist agreed with Archbishop Ncube. “I’m afraid the only thing we can do is wait for the Grim Reaper to take Mad Bob,” David Bullard wrote in Johannesburg’s Sunday Times. “Why He hasn’t done so already is anyone’s guess, but my informants tell me that not even Hell itself is in a hurry to receive Mugabe.”

And in a searing editorial, the Mail and Guardian newspaper, the ANC’s most valiant media defender in the heyday of apartheid, said, “South Africa has lost the high moral ground. Democracy has been sacrificed by both the South African and Zimbabwean governments. In its place, there is a slavish adherence to democratic form without its substance.

“Mbeki’s support for Mugabe has hurt his international reputation. The new Africa – represented by Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development and a revitalised African Union – is another loser.”

Fred Bridgland is IWPR’s Zimbabwe project editor in Johannesburg.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- With Chinese-made jet fighters zooming overhead, President Robert Mugabe marked Zimbabwe's 25th independence anniversary Monday with defiance, saying he had no need for Western-style democracy or aid from the West because ''we have turned East.''

Mugabe, 81, who has ruled the southern African nation since its independence, spoke emotionally of the legacy of British rule, charging that ''to this day we bear the lasting scars of that dark encounter with colonialism, often described in the West as civilizing.''

A bush war claimed 30,000 lives before independence in 1980, when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and Mugabe said he remembered the ''strangled shrieks of brave guerrilla fighters facing execution.''

The newly acquired Chinese jet fighters and older Russian fighters flew in salute as Mugabe arrived to deliver the 35-minute, nationally televised address.

Hawk jets bought from Britain in the 1980s have been grounded because Zimbabwe has been unable to get spare parts since an embargo was imposed in 2000, but Mugabe said he was no longer looking to the West for assistance.

''We have turned East, where the sun rises, and given our back to the West, where the sun sets,'' Mugabe told the 8,000 people at the Chinese-built national sports stadium, referring to efforts to seek new economic partners among the ''Asian tigers.''

Scorning accusations that March 31 parliamentary elections were rigged, he said: ''We made our own democracy and we owe it to no one, least of all the Europeans. Let it be forever remembered: it was the bullet that brought the ballot. Our ballots have not needed Anglo-American validation.''

The U.S. Embassy led those voicing doubts about the March 31 results and the Movement for Democratic Change opposition party said the election was stolen.

Mugabe's ZANU-PF party was declared the winner of 78 of Parliament's 120 elected seats. Another 41 seats went to the MDC and one went to an independent candidate.

Under Zimbabwe law, Mugabe appoints 30 more members of Parliament, and he now controls the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution.

In his speech, Mugabe thanked friendly African states for endorsing the election results.

The celebrations included the awarding of state honors to past presidents of Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

''We proclaim our pan-African spirit, stressing we shall never be a colony again,'' Mugabe said.

Conspicuously absent from the honors' list was former South Africa President Nelson Mandela. Mandela repeatedly has criticized Mugabe's human rights record during the last five years, though the South African government endorsed the March elections as free and fair.

Mugabe spoke of the recent redistribution of 5,000 white-owned farms to black Zimbabweans as among the major achievements of his rule.

''We have resolved the long outstanding land question and the land has now come to its rightful owners, and with it, our sovereignty as well,'' he said. ''Our people are happy and contented and that is all that matters.''

Agriculture, the mainstay in a country once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa, has collapsed and the economy has shrunk 50 percent since 2000, when ruling party militants began invading white-owned farms. Unemployment is at least 70 percent and at least 70 percent of the population live in poverty.

Only some 20,000 whites remain in Zimbabwe, compared with a 1974 peak of 293,000. But Mugabe attributed economic problems to ''induced'' flight of those with skills: 3.6 million of Zimbabwe's 15 million people live abroad, with most of them economic refugees in South Africa and Britain.

Mugabe said AIDS constituted the young nation's biggest challenge. The epidemic has ''really strained our health delivery system as well as our financial resources.''

He did not cite statistics, but health workers say at least 3,000 people a week are dying of HIV-related complaints.

Sewage and rotting garbage litter the streets as services and infrastructure continue to crumble.

By Dzikamai Chidyausiku in Harare

In Tafara, one of Harare’s working class suburbs, Cynthia Mutepfa wakes before dawn each day and walks three kilometres to fetch water from a makeshift well alongside one of the capital city’s heavily polluted streams.

Cynthia, 22, places a 20-litre plastic container on her head before tip-toeing through her back yard to avoid stepping into the maggot-infested raw sewage that has flooded from the local burst sewer tank.

She spends the best part of an hour jostling with other desperate residents for a few gallons of water from the unprotected well, which is just a mud hole dug deep to reach the water table beneath the city.

The majority of Tafara’s 100,000 residents have resorted to drinking water from local streams fed mainly by water from burst sewerage and drainage pipes. Cynthia, like thousands of others, last had tap water a month ago.

“We have gone for months without guaranteed water. The burst sewer pipes have not been repaired for two months,” Cynthia told IWPR.

Cynthia’s story has become typical of that of Harare residents - both in the city centre and the outlying townships - as water, electricity, garbage collection and other services have entered freefall.

Uncollected rubbish is even piling up in the central business district. Side lanes and street alleys reek with rotting garbage that has lain untouched for weeks as the ruling ZANU PF-appointed council fails to collect the waste due to alleged mismanagement, which has been exacerbated by the country’s crippling fuel shortages and power station breakdowns.

“We have no choice but to dump the rubbish anywhere we can as the council has not collected any for the past two weeks,” said Tinarwo Makura, a resident of Highfield, one of the oldest of Harare’s outer suburbs.

Most city roads are riddled with potholes so big that small cars could sink into them, while others are impassable because of huge holes dug by the council in its bid to repair the continuously bursting water pipes.

Raw sewage has been allowed to spill into Harare’s main water sources such as Lake Chivero, to the west of the capital, posing serious health threats to all its residents. Environmentalists and health experts warn that Harare is sitting on a disease time bomb.

Angus Martens, of the upmarket Arcadia suburb’s residents’ association, told IWPR that companies and residents alike had turned the small local Mukuvisi river into a dumping ground.

“There are no council services to talk of,” said Martens. “Homeowners and companies have had to resort to dumping their rubbish.”

Schools are turning pupils away because there is no drinking water or water to flush toilets. So desperate is the situation that a litre of imported water is more expensive than a litre of scarce petrol, which was heavily subsidised before the recent parliamentary election as a tactic by the governing ZANU PF.

Observers believe that the government is now frightened to end the subsidies for fear of accelerated inflation, already running at an estimated 400 per cent. One celebrated cartoon shows robbers holding up a man pushing a wheelbarrow-load of Weimar Republic-style cash. The crooks demand that their victim throw out the worthless banknotes and hand over the wheelbarrow.

Cars, buses and mini-bus taxis form long snaking queues at petrol stations in the hope that a tanker load of fuel might arrive. Zimbabweans have christened such lines of motorists “hope queues”.

As the water crisis worsens, some of the emergency wells and boreholes on which people are dependent are beginning to dry up because the water table is receding.

Janest Museve, who lives in the suburb of Hatfield, said the water from her emergency well had suddenly turned cloudy. “We are suffering,” she said. “The water we used to get from the well is now coming out very dirty.”

Collin Gwiyo, deputy secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, ZCTU, said, “Try to imagine waking up to go to work and there is no water for you to bathe, no electricity to warm your water up and cook food, then there is no transport to ferry you to work? How many problems can befall a person? That is the situation we arrived at in Zimbabwe.”

The situation is a classic case of how failed governance and political interference have led to the collapse of services right across the country.

Similar stories are reported from many smaller towns. In the mining town of Zvishavane, 300 km southwest of Harare, the weekly Standard newspaper reports raw sewage flowing on the streets as a result of unrepaired pipes.

In Marondera, southeast of the capital, schools are closing because of water and electricity supply problems. “The water cuts are unexpected and unexplained, and trying to find anyone in authority prepared to talk about the problem, the reason or the expected duration, is a complete waste of time,” said Marondera resident Cathy Buckle.

“A casual telephone enquiry about the daily power cuts to the local electricity offices resulted in a flustered employee giving some mumbled excuses about insufficient maintenance, no money for spares and no foreign currency.”

Harare residents attribute their city’s crumbling services to government meddling in the running of local authorities, which has seen elected councils being eliminated for political expediency.

The central government took control of Harare after voters elected Elias Mudzuri, of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, as mayor in 2002. All efforts by Mudzuri to run the city efficiently were blocked by the central government, which last year dismissed him and appointed its own commissioners, handpicked by Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo, to run the capital.

Since then services have been in freefall and nearly all the municipality’s engineers have resigned and left the country. Combined Harare Residents Association, CHRA, an umbrella body for the capital’s residents associations, blamed government’s interference for the crisis in the city, saying politics have taken precedence over good governance in most local authorities.

“Since the appointment of the government commission, service delivery has reached its lowest ebb,” a CHRA spokesman told IWPR. “Burst water pipes go unrepaired for weeks and the problem of street lights has not been attended to, plunging streets into darkness.”

The commission’s excuse for its failure to collect rubbish is the shortage of fuel and the expiry of contracts signed with private refuse collectors.

“The council has not collected refuse here for two months,” Israel Mabhou, chairman of the Mbare suburb residents’ association, said angrily. “Our last option would be to carry these bins and the rotting rubbish and dump them at [its headquarters]. We are sick and tired of their excuses.”

The situation is even worse in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, which has an MDC mayor. The central ZANU PF government has refused him and his city council all borrowing powers, making it virtually impossible to maintain minimal services.

Meanwhile, the government has lambasted the Bulawayo council for “peddling falsehoods” about mass starvation in the city. The latter issued a report last year claiming that several residents have died of starvation, as local grain production has collapsed and President Robert Mugabe has banned international agencies from distributing food aid.

Few people see an end to what is now a multiple crisis resulting from collapsed industries, non-functioning infrastructure and international isolation and sanctions.

An increasing number are as despairing, as 36-year-old Harare resident Constance Goredema who, with her nine-month-old baby on her back, told IWPR, “We won’t live. We won’t see next year. We are going to die.”

Dzikamai Chidyausiku is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Paramilitary units armed with batons and tear gas patrolled Harare's main roads Monday as police warned they would not tolerate any more protests against their crackdown on street trading -- the only livelihood for thousands in Zimbabwe's shattered economy.

Police Chief Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka said 9,653 people have been arrested in a five-day blitz on street vendors, flea market stalls and other informal businesses.

The roundup of street traders -- who include teachers and other professionals unable to make a living at their old jobs -- came as the government took drastic measures to address an economic crisis it once denied.

The crackdown is aimed at crushing the black market for scarce staple goods such as maize meal, sugar and gasoline. The government claims the traders are not licensed and blames them for sabotaging the economy.

Angry demonstrators clashed with police over the weekend in the most serious unrest since President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF won a landslide victory in March 31 parliamentary general elections, widely condemned by Western governments for alleged vote-rigging and intimidation. Mugabe, 81, has been in power since independence in 1980.

During the election campaign, the government had scoffed at critics who said the economy was on the verge of collapse. But since winning, it has taken drastic action, last week announcing a 45 percent devaluation of the Zimbabwean currency against the U.S. dollar, a ban on luxury imports and heavy subsidies for agriculture and exporters.

After seven years of unprecedented economic decline, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hard hit by Mugabe's seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, accused Mugabe of trying to create conditions for declaring a state of emergency, which would give him unlimited powers of detention, seizure and censorship.

Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of ordering the crackdown in response to pressure from newly arrived Chinese businessmen to stop secondhand dealers undercutting their cheap imports.

''The country has been mortgaged to the Chinese,'' Tsvangirai said in a statement. ''How can we violently remove Zimbabweans from our flea markets to make way for the Chinese? The majority of Zimbabweans depend on informal trade to feed, clothe and educate their families.''

Under Mugabe's ''Look East'' policy, the country has acquired airliners and jet fighters from Beijing, rejecting calls to restore links with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank severed in 1998 over chronic budget indiscipline.

Police chief Mandipaka said police were deployed and commuter buses were banned from the city center to prevent protests.

He said street vendors had been fined for operating without licenses and for possessing staple items such as maize meal, sugar and gasoline they planned to resell on the black market.

''Police will leave no stone unturned in their endeavor to flush out economic saboteurs,'' said Mandipaka.

One fruit vendor, Wilbetson Ndou, 60, said police raided his stall Saturday and confiscated everything in sight.

''I am cross. They just took everything. I've had a license for a year ... but they say they don't care,'' said Ndou. ''I have been selling like this on the street for 35 years.''

Crackdowns also were launched in the cities of Gweru and Bulawayo, strongholds of the opposition. In Harare's Mbare township, police seized 40 tons of sugar. Ten filling station attendants were arrested with 7,900 gallons of gasoline.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- The government threatened Tuesday to demolish squatter shacks in what it called an urban beautification campaign after the arrests of about 10,000 street traders in the capital, a stronghold of the opposition.

The opposition accused the ruling ZANU-PF party of trying to provoke confrontations so it can declare a state of emergency before the tattered state of the economy leads to riots.

''They are now going for broke,'' said Paul Themba-Nyathi, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. ''It is obvious these are all punitive measures aimed at urban people who voted against ZANU-PF.''

A five-day blitz against street vendors and flea markets already has sparked clashes between the traders and police, and unrest has been reported elsewhere. Police Chief Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka said Monday that 9,653 people have been arrested.

On Tuesday, the government set a June 20 deadline for demolishing unauthorized buildings in Harare unless the residents appeal and receive a grace period. The demolitions could evict more than a million urban poor in the middle of the Zimbabwe winter.

''The attitude of the members of the public as well as some city officials has led to the point whereby Harare has lost its glow. We are determined to get it back,'' government-appointed Mayor Sekesai Makwavara said in a statement.

She said all ''illegal structures'' would be demolished during the operation, which was dubbed ''Operation Marambatsvina'' or ''drive out rubbish.''

The crackdown on street traders -- who include teachers and other professionals unable to make a living at their old jobs -- is aimed at crushing the black market for scarce staple goods like maize meal, sugar and gasoline. The government claims the traders are not licensed and blames them for sabotaging the economy.

Lovemore Madhuku, a university teacher who leads the National Constitutional Assembly, an umbrella group of organizations seeking radical reform, warned the demolitions might ignite public anger on a scale unseen since the African nation gained independence from Britain in 1980.

''I think now people are really going to react,'' he said.

The cleanup ultimatum revived memories of the 1985 elections when ZANU-PF mobs, reacting to comments by longtime leader Robert Mugabe, forced thousands of families suspected of supporting the opposition from their township homes until they could produce ruling party cards. An unknown number of people were killed while police refused to intervene.

Township resident Petros Nyoni said the mood in Harare's crowded suburbs was tense Tuesday, with workers already angry at a police crackdown on the commuter minibuses that are the mainstay of the transport system.

Hundreds of the taxis have been grounded by lack of fuel at filling stations while many more have been impounded at roadblocks for allegedly being unfit to drive.

''There is a very big crisis. People are so desperate they are jumping through (minibus) windows or onto the roof carriers,'' he said.

After seven years of unprecedented economic decline, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hard hit by Mugabe's seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.

The government last week announced a 45 percent devaluation of the Zimbabwean currency against the dollar, a ban on luxury imports and heavy subsidies for agriculture and exporters.

Michael Davies, chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association, said more than half of the capital's population of 2 million to 3 million people live in housing marked for demolition. He said in some cases rents from the buildings were the only means of survival for elderly owners.

HARARE (Reuters) - Residents of Zimbabwe's capital clashed with police, damaging property and vehicles in the first major protest against a sweep on illegal traders which has seen nearly 18,000 arrests countrywide, police said on Thursday.

Police have arrested more than 10,000 people mainly in Harare and another 7,650 in the central city of Gweru since last week, seeking to subdue a black market economy that has thrived on shortages of foreign currency and basic commodities.

Residents fought with police in the opposition-dominated Harare suburb of Glen View on Wednesday after the razing of illegal roadside shacks and stalls provoked a violent response from some vendors and informal traders.

Police described the protesters as a ``group of mischief makers'' while media indicated they numbered more than 100.

Stone-throwing residents damaged several properties and vehicles, looted a major chain and blocked roads to protest the demolition of the structures, police said.

President Robert Mugabe's government, widely blamed for Zimbabwe's economic crisis, says the country has fallen prey to profiteers who buy everything from foreign currency to basic commodities for re-sell at higher prices on the black market.

Some traders complain they had been given little time to pull down their shacks or relocate, and that they had valid permits issued by city authorities.

State radio quoted a police official on Thursday saying 7,560 had been arrested in Gweru for hoarding basic commodities, illegal foreign currency trading and gold panning.

CRACKDOWN TO CONTINUE

Police spokesman Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka vowed ``Operation Restore Order'' would continue despite protests, saying several people were arrested after Wednesday's clashes.

``There is no going back. We are continuing with arrests and the long arm of the law will catch up with all those who took part in the disturbances,'' he told Reuters.

State radio said 500 additional police officers were on standby ``in case violence flares up.''

Mandipaka said illegal housing structures and settlements would be destroyed next and that police patrols had been stepped up to flush out ``criminal elements and troublemakers'' in suburbs where tensions remained high.

Critics point to Mugabe's policy of seizing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks for a slump in the key commercial farming sector, leading to food shortages and sharp drops in both foreign investment and tourism.

Police have also pounced on illegal immigrants, accused by authorities of siphoning scarce foreign currency abroad. The Zimbabwe dollar is trading on the black market at up to 25,000 to the U.S. dollar against an official rate of 9,000.

Shortages of fuel have left private motorists and urban commuters stranded for transport, heightening anger among workers, some now forced to walk to work.

Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, blames the country's crisis on local and foreign opponents of the land seizures, whom he says have ganged up to sabotage the economy.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Police demolished squatter homes and rounded up street vendors, leaving thousands homeless in Zimbabwe's opposition strongholds in what President Robert Mugabe insisted was an urban clean-up campaign.

All the demolished homes were in areas that voted for the opposition in Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections, and Morgan Tsvangirai, an opposition leader, said the destruction was an assault on the urban poor who make up its support base. Mugabe's ZANU-PF party claimed victory in the disputed vote on March 31.

State radio said Friday that Mugabe, in his first comment on the crackdown called ''Operation Marambatsvina'' or ''drive out trash,'' told the ruling party central committee that ''genuine players in the small and medium enterprise sector would be resettled in new and clean sites that befit major cities.''

Besides demolishing shacks in townships surrounding Harare, police also raided squatter settlements around the country.

''Widowed mothers, grandmothers and youth have been affected by this mindless clampdown,'' said Jenni Williams, a spokeswoman for Women of Zimbabwe Arise. The organization called for June 18 to be a day of peaceful protest against the demolition campaign.

Trudi Stevenson, an opposition legislator for northern Harare, said 500 to 700 houses in the Hatcliffe district had been razed.

''The place looks like a bombed site. It was a major military operation,'' she said.

Hatcliffe resident Emmanuel Chiroto said homeowners there had been allocated plots by Housing Minister Ignatius Chombo in 2002 and had lease agreements. The World Bank and USAID provided water and other services.

The demolition raids were launched Thursday night although the government said earlier it would not begin the destruction of informal settlements until July. The government has not explained why it began the demolitions immediately.

''We really do not know where they (police) are striking next,'' Lovemore Muchingedzi, a worker for the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change, said Friday in Glen Norah, a township on the southern edge of Harare where witnesses said riots broke out overnight as police arrested street vendors and burned their kiosks.

''Police went around beating up anyone they came across. They made sure there was no electricity in the area and under cover of darkness they were beating everyone up,'' said Muchingedzi, who said the area had quieted by daybreak.

Police are under orders to destroy ''illegal dwellings'' and vendors' shacks as part of a campaign to clean up the city. About half of the city's urban poor live in the shacks. About 10,000 street vendors have been arrested since the crackdown began eight days ago.

Tsvangirai said Mugabe would use the operation as a pretext for calling a state of emergency, which would give the government unlimited powers of search, seizure and detention as the country goes into a food crisis with up to 4 million people needing aid.

Before the parliamentary elections, Mugabe refused assistance saying the country had had a ''bumper harvest.'' His ZANU-PF party was alleged to have controlled food deliveries to influence the vote.

After seven years of unprecedented economic decline, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hard hit by Mugabe's seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Major increases in the price of staple foods went into effect Saturday as President Robert Mugabe, who recently refused assistance claiming the country had a bumper harvest, acknowledged that Zimbabwe needs food aid to avert famine.

The price hikes -- 51 percent for maize meal and 29 percent for bread -- came days ahead of a meeting with James Morris, World Food Program chief, to discuss Zimbabwe's massive food aid requirements despite its longstanding claims it was self-sufficient.

Zimbabwe's economy has slowly collapsed since Mugabe introduced his land reform program and confiscated white-owned farms, beginning five years ago. Zimbabwe's once thriving agricultural sector, which made it the regional bread basket, is destroyed.

Still, Saturday's price hikes, announced on state radio, were taken with apparent resignation in Harare, where residents had fought running battles with police last week as paramilitary squads torched and bulldozed roadside shops and hundreds of homes.

Tens of thousands of people were arrested or left homeless in the midwinter cold.

Opposition politicians said the blitz by authorities was intended to subdue the population and so forestall riots which followed price rises in 1998, when at least seven people died after Mugabe deployed troops backed by tanks into the townships.

''Things are really calm now,'' said Lovemore Machingedzi, an official of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the capital's southern suburbs, which bore the brunt of the unrest of the past few days.

Machingedzi warned, however, of an explosive mood with the once-landless blacks who were powerful supporters of Mugabe's government now facing the demolition of settlements they established after seizing the white-owned farms.

''My understanding is that the situation where they are is very, very tense because they thought they could do what they want,'' he said.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of launching the attacks to punish the urban poor for voting against his ruling Zanu-PF, which won the disputed March 31 parliamentary elections. The clampdown on street traders last week, opposition politicians said, was to intimidate people ahead of the food price hikes and to deter protests as economic catastrophe looms.

At a meeting of his ruling party central committee Friday, Mugabe publicly backed the crackdown on street traders and shack dwellers, officially code named ''Operation Murambatsvina,'' or ''Operation Drive Out Trash.''

According to the opposition, Mugabe wants the urban poor, who lived in the small shacks and ran the roadside shops, to return to rural areas where he can control them.

''Our towns and cities, including the capital, had become havens for illicit and criminal practices which just could not be allowed to go on,'' he said.

Mugabe's government has blamed speculators, black market dealers and alleged Western economic sanctions for the current economic crisis.

After predicting a ''bumper'' 2.5 million metric ton maize harvest and scorning aid offers, Mugabe now admits the country urgently needs more than 1.2 million tons to save 4 million Zimbabweans from famine.

His fiercest critic, Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, has accused Mugabe of using access to food to intimidate rural voters, while the MDC alleges a plan to drive the urban poor back to the countryside ''where they can be more easily controlled.''

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Police torched six miles of shacks and kiosks in an opposition stronghold near Victoria Falls on Monday during an ongoing operation critics says is aimed at scapegoating street traders for Zimbabwe's near-emergency economic crisis.

The burnings were just the latest sign of economic chaos in the southern African nation -- once the regional breadbasket. In the last week, the government dramatically boosted staple food prices, devalued its currency by 45 percent and warned 4 million of its people may face famine.

Thousands of street traders have been arrested and their wares seized or destroyed since the crackdown began May 19, and police using torches, sledgehammers and bulldozers have burned and demolished kiosks and homes of the urban poor in shantytowns around the country. The campaign has left thousands sleeping in the open, government opponents say.

The main opposition group Movement for Democratic Change sought a court order Monday to stop the razings and demand compensation for owners of buildings already destroyed.

The government characterizes its action as an urban renewal campaign to clear up cities and crush the black market for scarce staple goods like cornmeal, sugar and gasoline. Mugabe, who has a history of accusing others for his country's woes, says the unlicensed traders are sabotaging the economy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has described Zimbabwe as one of the last ''outposts of tyranny,'' accusing President Robert Mugabe of an ongoing campaign of violence against the opposition.

An opposition spokesman used similar language.

''A government that destroys the property of people who are trying to make and honest living is evil,'' MDC spokesman Paul Themba-Nyathi said. ''We call on all Zimbabweans to mobilize against this assault on their dignity, livelihoods and well being. We shall overcome this tyranny.''

Tough new security laws provide a 20-year prison term for anyone trying to ''coerce'' Mugabe's government and no demonstrations have been reported in connection with the demolitions. But over the weekend, residents in some areas put boulders across a maze of side roads in futile attempts to keep out security forces.

On the outskirts of the resort town of Victoria Falls, along the road to the airport, police burned a six-mile line of kiosks Monday and claimed to have confiscated a large amount of stolen or illegally imported goods.

In northern Harare, police forced more than 2,000 people ''at gunpoint'' to destroy their homes in northern Harare on Sunday and Monday, MDC legislator Trudi Stevenson said. On Friday and Saturday, 7,000 were evicted despite lease agreements issued by Mugabe's government.

''The people are homeless and sleeping in the open,'' she said. Many were trying to salvage building materials, hoping they would be allocated other plots.

The economy has been sliding since Mugabe introduced his land reform program and confiscated 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks, beginning five years ago.

Zimbabwe's once thriving agricultural sector is destroyed. Prices of staple foods rose substantially Saturday and Mugabe, after predicting a ''bumper'' corn harvest and scorning aid offers, admitted the country urgently needs more than 1.2 million tons of corn to save 4 million Zimbabweans from famine.

Also last week, the government announced a 45 percent devaluation of the Zimbabwean currency against the U.S. dollar, a ban on luxury imports and heavy subsidies for agriculture and exporters. Currently, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated.

Meanwhile, in the eastern city of Mutare, police said they arrested an American, identified only as Howard Smith Gilman, under media laws for allegedly covering the destruction of 9,000 illegal structures there. Zimbabwe's media laws make it illegal to operate without a license.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe police have arrested more than 22,000 people as a blitz on illegal stores and shantytowns gathers pace, sending homeless people fleeing to the countryside, the state Herald newspaper said Wednesday.

The United States warned Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's government the crackdown could lead to a violent backlash.

Zimbabwe's official Herald newspaper said police had arrested 22,735 people in a campaign the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has called a political vendetta against residents of its urban strongholds.

In a statement, State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck noted that police had clashed with shanty-dwellers during the exercise and warned its citizens in the country to be cautious.

``The arrests have been widespread and are creating the potential of a violent backlash from the affected communities,'' Beck said. ``However, law and order has not broken down.''

The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, whose party gains overwhelming support from urban areas, denounced the crackdown and repeated calls for people to mobilize resistance.

``Property worth millions of dollars has gone up in flames. Families are out in the open -- without jobs, without income, without shelter without support,'' Tsvangirai told a news conference. ``Overnight, Zimbabwe has a massive internal refugee population in its urban areas.''

Rights group Amnesty International also condemned the crackdown as a ``flagrant disregard for internationally recognized human rights'' and said people should be compensated for property destroyed by the government.

Mugabe's government says the campaign is meant to stamp out black market trading and other crime in slums around Harare and other cities.

Police have used sledgehammers and bulldozers to demolish thousands of illegal shacks and torched others, leaving residents scrambling to secure their possessions before their homes and businesses are destroyed.

Many of those displaced by the crackdown are seeking to return to their family homes in the countryside, although a desperate fuel shortage caused by Zimbabwe's deepening economic crisis has made transport difficult.

VICTIMS OF FAILED POLICES

``It is tragic that the government of Zimbabwe has chosen to assault the victims of its failed economic policies. The government must address the country's serious governance problems if it wants to reverse the collapse of the economy,'' Beck said.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's Special Envoy to Southern Africa James Morris met Mugabe Wednesday to discuss widespread food shortages in Zimbabwe, which have been worsened by a region-wide dry spell.

He said Mugabe had promised to allow an increase in food aid distributions but he said he could not say whether the crackdown would impact on the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe has seen its economy contract by some 30 percent over the past five years and is reeling from shortages of foreign exchange, fuel and other key commodities amid sharp drops in international investment and tourism.

Critics say the crisis has been caused in large part by Mugabe's controversial policy of seizing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks -- a move they say has all but destroyed the key commercial agricultural sector.

Mugabe, 81, and in power since independence from Britain in 1980, lays the blame for the crisis on domestic and foreign opponents of his land reform program, who he says are bent on sabotaging the country.

The crackdown marks the first major police campaign since Mugabe's ZANU-PF party won a big victory in March parliamentary elections, which the MDC and Western governments said were rigged. Government officials insist ZANU-PF won fairly.

Tsvangirai said the urban clean-up was specifically aimed at MDC supporters with an eye to eliminating all opposition.

``The attacks on the urban population is part of a broad strategy to destabilize specific constituencies and to distort the voting patterns of Zimbabweans in favor of ZANU-PF,'' he said.

The government denies any political motive for the crackdown and says it is being broadly welcomed by Zimbabweans who want to see order restored in cities.

The Herald paper quoted police as saying many of those made homeless were being taken to a farm outside Harare where they were being processed before being sent back to rural areas.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- The Zimbabwean government kept up its blitz on shack dwellers and street traders despite reports on Saturday that President Robert Mugabe had ordered a halt to the two-week crackdown.

In the northwestern town of Chinhoyi, police arrested 708 vendors and seized scarce staples including sugar, cornmeal and cooking oil, said state radio. They also arrested 621 gold prospectors, a source of income for many unemployed.

More than 30,000 people have been detained and a further 200,000 have lost their homes since the start of the crackdown on May 19, U.N. housing expert Miloon Kothari said in Geneva on Friday. He urged the government to halt its campaign of mass evictions, calling it a clear violation of human rights.

''The vast majority are homeless in the streets,'' Kothari said. ''This kind of a mass eviction drive is a classic case where the intention appears to be that Harare become a city for the rich, for the middle class, for those that are well-off ... and the poor are to be pushed away.''

Zimbabwe was plunged into political and economic turmoil when Mugabe's government began seizing thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to blacks in 2000. Combined with years of drought, the often-violent land reform program has crippled agriculture -- the country's economic base.

Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk 50 percent during the past five years, and the unemployment rate is at least 70 percent. Agriculture -- the country's economic base -- has collapsed, and at least 70 percent of the population lives in poverty.

On Saturday, police were deploying forces to suppress possible protests. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena told state radio that they would ''deal with political parties and other non-governmental organizations who are trying to take advantage of the 'clean up campaign' to gain political mileage.''

Leslie Gwindi, spokesman for the government-appointed Harare City Council, said the next phase in the capital would see homeowners heavily fined for not ''sprucing up'' and repainting their properties although most say that in current economic crisis conditions they cannot afford it. Cement and paint are only available on the black market.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, alleges urban poor are being punished for supporting his party during recent general elections. The government has denied the accusations.

Amnesty International has also condemned the crackdown, saying it has left whole communities without shelter and destroyed thousands of livelihoods.

Kothari, the U.N. envoy on the right to adequate housing, said that if the current eviction drive continued, 2 million to 3 million people could be affected -- about one quarter of Zimbabwe's population.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Police fought running battles until dawn Friday with supporters of a general strike called to protest a government campaign against shack dwellers and street traders, the strike organizer said.

Lovemore Madhuku, the head of the group that called the strike, said anti-riot police beat and fired tear gas at protesters and shot bullets over their heads in the Chitungwiza township south of Harare.

The violence erupted, he said, after police set up roadblocks on all routes in and out of Chitungwiza and other crowded southern township and searched people after forcing them to leave their vehicles.

Madhuku said he did not know how many people had been injured or arrested. Police could not be reached for comment.

Most businesses remained open with skeleton staffs Friday, the second day of the two-day strike. Police have the power to seize the goods and trading license of any business that fails to open.

State radio described the strike Friday as ''a failed attempt to sabotage Zimbabwe's economic turnaround.''

President Robert Mugabe criticized the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change for ''sacrificing the interests of the people of Zimbabwe in a bid to serve their colonial masters,'' the station reported.

Economists said five years of unprecedented economic decline in Zimbabwe have left only about 800,000 of its 12 million people with jobs in the formal sector, making it difficult to gauge the effect of the strike.

Madhuku claimed it had received at least 50 percent support in most towns and cities despite repeated police threats to ''deal ruthlessly'' with anyone who supported the strike. He conceded, however, the strike failed to achieve the economic paralysis intended.

The strike was called to protest a government crackdown in which police have torched or demolished thousands of shacks of the urban poor and arrested at least 30,000 street vendors.

The government said the crackdown is a cleanup campaign for cities and an attempt to stop the activities of black market traders, which it calls economic saboteurs who hoard and sell goods in short supply in the country.

The United Nations, which estimated at least 200,000 people have been left homeless by the crackdown, has called the campaign a human rights violation.

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Police say they have razed more than 20,000 shacks and other structures in what President Robert Mugabe calls an urban cleanup campaign -- but what critics at home and abroad have decried as an assault on the poor.

Police Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka, quoted Tuesday in a government newspaper, said that 21,194 ''illegal structures'' had been demolished nationwide, and 32,435 people arrested since ''Operation Murambatsvina'' -- drive out trash -- began May 19.

''The operation continues until we have weeded out all criminal elements countrywide,'' Mandipaka told The Herald.

Zimbabwean clerics, doctors, teachers and human rights lawyers have called the mass evictions and arrests of street traders a crime against the poor. The human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the government's actions and the United Nations has called them a clear violation of human rights.

The charges are just the latest in years of allegations of widespread human rights abuse by Mugabe's authoritarian government. Condoleezza Rice recently labeled Zimbabwe an outpost of tyranny, while world governments and human rights groups have accused his party of rigging elections, repressing opponents and driving agriculture to the brink of collapse.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has its support base among the urban poor, and says ''Operation Murambatsvina'' is aimed at forcing them to rural areas where the government can more easily control them.

Thousands of people who apparently have nowhere else to go are living amid the ruins of their bulldozed homes in the winter chill.

Education Minister Aeneas Chigwedere said Monday that people would be moved on to an ''appropriate place,'' adding that there is ''nobody in Zimbabwe who does not have a rural home.''

HARARE (Reuters) - Two Zimbabwean children were crushed to death by rubble during the demolition of illegal houses this month in a government crackdown that has made tens of thousands homeless, state media reported Thursday.

The deaths were the first reported in Zimbabwe's ``Operation Restore Order,'' which has sparked an international outcry and prompted the United Nations to dispatch a special envoy to assess the humanitarian situation.

Rights groups Amnesty International and the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) said more than 200 African and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had called on the United Nations and African Union to intervene over the clean-up operation.

The groups told a news conference in Harare that NGOs had been barred from independently giving aid to affected people and instead directed to work with the government.

``The coalition of organizations urged Nigerian President (Olusegun) Obasanjo, as chair of the Africa Union, to put the crisis in Zimbabwe on the agenda of the upcoming AU Assembly,'' Amnesty and the COHRE said in a statement. The African Union holds its annual summit in Sirte, Libya on July 4-5.

Zimbabwe's official Herald newspaper said a one-and-a-half year-old child was crushed to death by rubble in Harare's Chitungwiza township Sunday while a one-year-old similarly died earlier this month in another neighborhood.

Police were not immediately available for comment.

Former colonial power Britain and the United States added their calls for African intervention in Zimbabwe.

``If the reports are simply half true ... this is a situation of serious international concern and no government that subscribes to human rights and democracy should allow this kind of thing to go on effectively under their noses,'' British Foreign Minister Jack Straw told a news conference in London.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called events in the southern African state ``tragic.''

GOVT FRUSTRATES AID EFFORTS

Thousands of self-employed people have seen their informal shops demolished and goods confiscated in the six-week campaign which officials say has also made 120,000 people homeless.

Human rights groups said as many as 300,000 people have been evicted countrywide. Officials from local rights groups said the government was frustrating NGOs' efforts to access information on the numbers of people in need of aid.

``The government has stopped us from directly assisting the people. We have to work with government committees which is a drawback on our progress,'' Alouis Chaumba, director of the Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice said.

President Robert Mugabe's government argues that illegal structures in cities had become a haven for illegal trade in foreign currency and scarce food items. Police say the operation has reduced crime by a fifth in Harare.

The campaign has also sparked angry criticism from Zimbabwe's main opposition party and religious groups, who say it is unfairly targeting the urban poor and making many homeless as temperatures drop in the southern hemisphere winter.

Rights groups said they were engaging U.N. agencies on how to help people already sleeping on the streets beside the rubble of their homes, and to halt the evictions and demolitions.

Critics say the crackdown has worsened Zimbabwe's economic crisis, shown in chronic shortages of foreign currency, high inflation and unemployment of over 70 percent.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Rights groups showed a smuggled video Thursday of hundreds of thousands of poor Zimbabweans living in the open in the winter cold after the government tore down their homes in what it describes as an urban renewal project.

At news conferences in Africa and at the United Nations, more than 200 international human rights and civic groups said the campaign, known as Operation Drive Out Trash, was ''a grave violation of international human rights law and a disturbing affront to human dignity.''

Police prevent journalists from filming the demolitions, so the footage was collected clandestinely by the church-based Solidarity Peace Trust.

The groups, including London-based Amnesty International and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, released the footage showing bewildered families sleeping in the open in the winter cold after police torched and bulldozed their shanty town homes. Street markets were also targeted, their stalls left in smoldering ruins.

Zimbabwe opposition leaders, who have their base among the urban poor, say the monthlong campaign is meant to punish their supporters for voting against the ruling party in recent parliamentary elections.

President Robert Mugabe has described Drive Out Trash as an urban renewal campaign.

The Zimbabwean government pledged Thursday to build new houses for those it has made homeless. After a seven-hour meeting of the government's highest policy-making body, Zimbabwe spokesman Ephraim Masawi was quoted on state radio as saying military personnel would lead national and provincial reconstruction committees being formed immediately.

Answering questions Wednesday during a stormy parliamentary session, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa conceded harm had been done to legitimate housing by what he called a ''cleanup'' meant to flush out black marketeers and criminals. The government blames them for runaway inflation of 144 percent and shortages of most staples.

''We are aware that there is damage, people are homeless and so forth,'' the minister said. ''But government has put into place the necessary logistics to address those immediate concerns, such as health.''

Since police launched the blitz in Harare on May 19, it has been extended throughout the country, causing sporadic rioting as impoverished residents tried to resist the destruction of their homes and livelihoods.

This week, the campaign in a nation facing severe food shortages moved on to the vegetable gardens planted by the poor in vacant lots around Harare. Authorities say the plots threaten the environment.

International rights groups said at least 300,000 people have lost their homes by conservative estimates. The United Nations puts the figure as high as 1.5 million, though Zimbabwe police only acknowledge about 120,000.

More than 42,000 people have also been arrested, fined or had their goods confiscated, police said in the state-run Herald newspaper.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, who has been a sharp critic of the evictions, was shown on the human rights groups' video saying he was so angered by the campaign he was ''ready to stand before a gun and be shot.''

At Hatcliffe Extension, a Harare township, residents told human rights groups they were being forced from homes given to them by the government itself ahead of elections in 2000 and 2002.

They said in the footage they were driven in trucks to a patch of wilderness on the outskirts of the capital, where they were shown surrounded by their paltry possessions.

''We were dumped here by people with whips,'' said one young man, whose name was not released for fear of retribution. ''We don't know what went wrong. We were given these stands (plots) by the government.''

When lawyers asked a high court to bloc the Hatcliffe evictions, they were told the removals were justified because some residents had made improvements to their properties without prior government approval, Arnold Tsunga of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said at a news conference in Johannesburg.

The rights groups urged the African Union, which is meeting in Libya next month, and the United Nations to act against Zimbabwe -- but did not specify how.

They also demanded that Zimbabwe compensate the displaced and allow them access to humanitarian workers, who they say are currently being blocked from providing relief.