By AFP
Harare : Zimbabwe’s opposition slammed the “deafening silence” Tuesday of Africa in the aftermath of the country’s elections, warning of blood on the streets unless pressure is brought to bear on Robert Mugabe.
As party lawyers argued at the high court for an immediate announcement of the result of the March 29 presidential poll, the Movement for Democratic Change’s number two said its supporters were being provoked into violence as part of a strategy to impose a state of emergency.
In events on the ground, the country’s commercial farmers’ union said 60 of the last remaining white farmers had now been forced off their land in an echo of the unrest which followed Mugabe’s last electoral reverse eight years ago.
While there has been a flurry of behind-the-scenes diplomacy in the 10 days since the country went to the polls, African heads of state have declined to put their name to calls for the presidential results to be announced.
Exasperated by the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough, MDC secretary general Tendai Biti said “the deafening silence by our brothers and sisters” in Africa was symptomatic of the continent’s failure to react to crises.
Drawing a parallel to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which some 800,000 people lost their lives, Biti urged institutions such as the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to take a clear stand as he reiterated party claims that pro-government militias were being armed.
“We (Africa) responded poorly in Rwanda and a million people were killed,” Biti told a press conference. “I say don’t wait for dead bodies on the streets of Harare. Intervene now. There’s a constitutional and legal crisis in Zimbabwe.”
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who has already declared himself the outright winner over his old rival Mugabe, met with senior members of South Africa’s ruling ANC party on Monday, including its president Jacob Zuma.
In an interview with South African television, Zuma criticised the delay. “I don’t think it augurs it very well,” he told SABC.
However South African President Thabo Mbeki, who mediated between the MDC and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in the build-up to the election, has so far only called for all sides to await the election results and called the situation “manageable.”
Observer missions from the African Union and SADC both gave the elections a largely clean bill of health, even though the outcome is still unknown.
While there has still to be any significant outbreak of violence since polling day, Biti accused the Zimbabwean authorities of deliberately sitting on the results of the presidential election in order to provoke the opposition into violence.
“Why do they want us to go in that direction? It’s because they want to declare a state of emergency.” The opposition fears that a state of emergency could allow Mugabe, who has ruled since independence in 1980, to suppress the election results and therefore cling to power.
ZANU-PF has already called for a complete recount of the poll even before the release of results and authorities have arrested seven election officials for allegedly undercounting votes cast for the president.
Simultaneous parliamentary results have been announced in which the MDC wrested control from ZANU-PF for the first time, but Mugabe’s ruling party is contesting enough seats to reverse their victory.
In a bid to force an end to the presidential results delay, the MDC has been trying to persuade the high court to order the electoral commission to release them forthwith.
A high court judge agreed on Tuesday to consider the MDC’s case urgently but the hearing was held over until Wednesday.
The head of the election commission, meanwhile, said the body was continuing to try and produce the presidential result but was hampered by financial and personnel problems.
“We have scaled down because most of the people were support staff for the house of assembly, senatorial and council results. We are also scaling down because of costs,” said ZEC chairman George Chiweshe.
With an unemployment rate of some 80 percent and six-digit inflation, around three million of Zimbabwe’s 13 million population have left the country, where even basics such as bread and cooking oil are now hard to come by.