Election violence, intimidation spirals as Mugabe poll threat grows

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Elections Zimbabwe-style have never been free of violence and intimidation - it's only the scale that has differed, participants say.

Violence and punitive attacks around elections in areas where opposition candidates show strength has been the norm since the nation's first all-race elections in 1979 that led to independence from Britain. But this time, it's worse.

President Robert Mugabe, the country's single ruler since independence, has called elections for June 24-25. The poll signals the biggest challenge yet to his two-decade hold on power because of the emergence of a strong challenger - the labor-backed Movement for Democratic Change party.

And already the killing has begun.

At least 23 government opponents have died in political violence since the government lost a constitutional referendum in February - its biggest defeat at the polls since independence.

Thousands of others have been assaulted or had their rural homes torched, mainly by ruling party supporters, the main opposition party has alleged. Many have fled to towns.

"We are now seeing far greater violence to scare the new opposition," said Masipula Sithole, an opposition candidate in the last parliamentary elections in 1995.

Sithole, a political scientist at Harare's University of Zimbabwe, ran for the small Zimbabwe Unity Movement, which failed to win any seats in the 120 elected constituencies. ZUM attracted less than 5 percent of ballots cast.

In the run-up to that poll, Sithole received death threats from anonymous callers and suspected ruling party militants failed in a bid to firebomb his car, he said.

"We were a small, alternative voice. We were of little consequence but we were still seen as daring to oppose Mugabe and that made us his enemy, one to be crushed," Sithole said.

Mugabe's first response to the Movement for Democratic Change was to crack down, using ruling party militants and veterans of the 1970s liberation war against white rule to assault opposition supporters and their backers, including white farmers, Sithole said.

Mobs of squatters and ruling party militants have illegally and violently staked claims to land on more than 1,200 white-owned farms in recent months, demanding that farmers withdraw their support for the opposition.

In recent days, another 13 white-owned farms have been occupied, the Commercial Farmers Union said Saturday.

Margaret Dongo, who also stood against the ruling party in the last 1995 parliamentary poll, won her seat as one of three opposition lawmakers only after the High Court ruled voting was rigged in her area.

Ballot boxes had been stuffed with more pro-Mugabe votes than the number of voters registered in Dongo's constituency.

Dongo had also received threats. A firebomb was hurled at her home. Her supporters were beaten and hounded by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU PF, she said.

"It's ZANU PF's way of campaigning. It hasn't changed except we are seeing more violence," she said.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said his party was urging supporters to discard party T-shirts and membership cards to protect themselves from assailants who search for opposition materials, often in house-to-house raids late at night.

"Intimidation is so massive we advise our members to avoid openly showing they are for MDC," Tsvangirai said.

Campaigning Zimbabwe-style has usually been accompanied by punitive attacks and recrimination after polling results have gone against candidates favored by Mugabe, said Sithole, the former opposition candidate.

But this time, he believes, voters won't be fazed by those memories.

"You can abuse people only so far. I think Zimbabweans have been pushed across the line," he said. "There's no coming back to subservience."

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