Mugabe defiant as MDC mulls poll

Morgan Tsvangirai is said to be under pressure to stand down from Zimbabwe's election as the violence caused by Mugabe spirals to new levels. So far 70 members of MDC have been killed and 25,000 have been removed from their homes in a campaign of violence which Mugabe is spearheading.

There is new footage shot by the staff at the American Embassy in Zimbabwe which shows Mugabe's thugs hunting down members of the MDC, scenes which are being repeated throughout Zimbabwe.

Mugabe is saying that "only God" can remove him from office.

Tsvangirai is now in a bind. Does he push on with escalating violence all around him? Does he continue to insist on an election with a populace who may now be too terrified to vote? Or certainly too terrified to vote against Mugabe?

There's a part of me that thinks he's threatening to throw in the towel as a way of trying to shame other African nations into condemning Mugabe's disgraceful behaviour. Yesterday, the first cracks appeared, Tsvangirai might be feeling - that by threatening to give up completely - that he might turn that trickle into a flood.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, one of Mr Mugabe's closest allies, has urged him to stop the violence.

Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe, head of an election monitoring team, told the BBC earlier this week that violence appeared to be "escalating throughout Zimbabwe".

Gordon Brown has gone further than most leaders and accused Mugabe of attempting to steal the election.

"Mugabe's increasingly desperate and isolated regime has unleashed still more violence. This is a blatant attempt to intimidate and to steal the election," he said.

Mugabe will, of course, simply write this off as more imperial interventionism.

The MDC suffered at least five violent deaths of activists or their family members this week and its secretary general, Tendai Biti, was charged with treason and subversion.

"Differences of opinion" have emerged among the party's senior officials over its next move, MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa told the BBC after the leadership met in Harare on Friday.

The party, he said, needed to assess the situation in the country but if conditions did not change, the vote would be a "charade".

"We are assessing the situation as some areas are inaccessible," he added.

"People are being abducted at night. Our grass-roots activists are being subjected to terror. Some of them are staying in the bushes and mountains to avoid Zanu-PF militias.

"Unless there's a change in conditions on the ground, the election will be a charade."

It is very easy for me, sitting thousands of miles away - and in no danger of any kind - to insist that the MDC should see this through to the end, but Tsvangirai's point appears to also be spelling out that there is no justification in all these people dying if, at the end of the day, Zimbabweans are so terrified that they will simply re-elect Mugabe anyway through their fear of the terrible violence that he is unleashing.

Were this a novel, the hero would bravely soldier on and the populace would reward him by ejecting Mugabe from office in a landslide. Unfortunately, life is rarely that simple and Tsvangirai is preparing us for that harsh reality. Sometimes the bad guy wins by employing the most brutal means; and the rest of the world issues condemnations, but essentially does nothing.

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Tags: Morgan Tsvangirai, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe, elections. violence, MDC, Zanu-PF