Mugabe faces bruising election battle to survive

Ghost voters
According to independent monitors, civil societies and church groups, the electoral roll is riddled with ghost voters, electoral boundaries favor Mugabe's rural power base, and there are too few urban polling stations to handle the expected crush. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is stacked with former and current military personnel loyal to Mugabe.

Police and thugs from the youth wing of Mugabe's party routinely intimidate, arrest and beat opposition party members and supporters.

Tsvangirai told a rally Sunday that he expects Mugabe to "engage in every trick in the book," and is demanding the Electoral Commission address reports that it printed 9 million ballots for 5.9 million registered voters.

Mugabe's government also is seeking to control what is said about the elections. Most of the 300 international journalists who applied for accreditation have been refused, and chief government spokesman George Charamba has warned that those who manage to cover the election from inside Zimbabwe will be under constant surveillance.

The Foreign Correspondents' Association of Southern Africa condemned the "near-blanket denial of accreditation" and noted that "rare approvals were given according to race or nationality."

"When the government rejects all fears of a rigged election, why is it trying to shield these elections from the vast majority of professional journalists?" the association asked.

Western election monitors are barred, and only delegates from "friendly" countries such as Iran, China, Russia and Libya are invited. The Southern African Development Community Lawyers Association complained Thursday that it had not been given accreditation to observe.

Also invited is a delegation from the Southern African Development Community, the bloc that appointed South African President Thabo Mbeki to mediate in Zimbabwe. Mbeki, criticized for a policy of "quiet diplomacy" many see as encouraging Mugabe's intransigence, claims he successfully negotiated an agreement for free and fair elections to be held.

Tsvangirai's party rejects "suggestions that our participation in this election is proof of the success of the SADC. It is possibly proof of the failure of that process."

Despite the widely alleged irregularities, the SADC observer mission in Zimbabwe says everything is in place for a free vote.

War ended white rule
Mugabe led a guerrilla movement that fought a seven-year war to end white rule in what was then Rhodesia and bring independent Zimbabwe into being in 1980. Then, Mugabe was hailed for his conciliatory attitude to the white minority, the preservation of democratic and legal structures inherited from the British, and the introduction of education and health care for all.

But few have benefited and millions suffer from Mugabe's most ambitious project to reverse the colonial legacy — the often violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms that destroyed the country's agricultural base. Most whites have since been driven off their farms along with farm laborers and their families numbering more than 1 million people.

Some 5,000 white farmers owned 80 percent of Zimbabwe's best agricultural land at independence — an injustice that Britain promised to remedy by buying land on a willing seller-willing buyer basis. But Britain halted its program, charging most land was going not to landless peasants but to Mugabe's relatives and cronies.

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