The Ink-stained finger which voters hope will keep them alive
Democracy, Mugabe style:
The state run newspaper is predicting a massive turnout for Mugabe, and have the gall to pretend that this is what the people of Zimbabwe want, when they must know that the people are voting because they fear that, if they do not, they will face a dreadful punishment.The young man who gave his name only as Wilson wanted just one thing from yesterday's presidential election in Zimbabwe: the indelible red ink on his little finger to show he had voted.
"They said they would come to see if we voted," he said after casting his ballot in a tent in a Harare suburb. "They know if we went to vote we would have to vote for the president. They were watching."
Who are "they"?
"The ones who made us go to the meetings at night. The ones who told us we must be careful to correct our mistake."
Wilson voted for Robert Mugabe yesterday, against his will but judging that it was the best way to save himself from a beating or worse.
The UN has said that it "regrets" the Zimbabwean election but has stopped short of saying that the election was illegitimate, which is pretty spineless.The Zanu-PF militia was out early in Chitungwiza, one of the Harare townships where the ruling party unleashed its violent campaign of retribution to "reorient" people who voted for the opposition last time. They moved from house to house at dawn, singing liberation war songs and banging on doors to warn people to vote.
Near some polling stations in the township, voters were directed to buildings where ruling party activists told them to record the serial numbers of the ballot paper they received at the voting booth and to return with it.
The results, which after the election in which Mugabe lost took almost five weeks to surface, are miraculously to be available on Saturday afternoon. What a difference it makes to the whole process when Mugabe is guaranteed victory.
The European Union and the US earlier dismissed the vote as meaningless. Foreign ministers for the Group of Eight nations (G8) meeting in Japan said they could not accept the legitimacy of a government "that does not reflect the will of the Zimbabwean people".The question now is what the world community is actually prepared to do to overturn this outrageous fix. Mugabe has stated that he intends to attend the African Union summit. I would hope that - difficult as it is - that some members of that Union will use the opportunity to publicly slay him for this brutal assault on his own people.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said they would consult other members of the UN Security Council to see what "next steps" might need to be taken. "There was a strong sentiment... that what is going on in Zimbabwe is simply unacceptable in the 21st century and it can't be ignored by the international community," she said.
The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, read out a statement by the Security Council which said members "agreed that conditions for free and fair elections did not exist and it was a matter of deep regret that the election went ahead in these circumstances."
He is not the legitimate leader of Zimbabwe, and people need to make that fact crystal clear to him.
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