Zimbabwe before and after the June 2000 elections: an assessment (continued)

A recurrent theme of all ZANU PF discussions is Mugabe's future and the race to succeed him. Until recently, the front-runner seemed to be Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa (who lost his parliamentary seat in the June 2000 elections), partly because he has long been Mugabe's favourite (and was his personal security advisor in the late 1970s), partly because he has the support of almost all senior army officers. Regarded as one of the toughest of the liberation struggle politicians, his record as a guerrilla leader and then as security minister from 1980 to 1988 has made him a leading force in the party. Those foreign diplomats and businessmen who subscribe to the "strongman theory" of African politics regard him as undemocratic but tough enough to re-establish order. However, rather than change policy, the circle of sycophants around Mugabe believed it could use the state security apparatus to undercut whatever rural opposition there existed and utilize a militant squad of war veterans to intimidate opposition supporters in the urban centres. It was a well-calculated strategy aimed at singling out the MDC leadership at the local level and attacking and intimidating them. Indeed, the campaign of land invasions by war veterans neatly combined ZANU PF's three political imperatives:

• to manipulate the core political issue of access to land;
• to face down opposition supporters and their financiers; and
• to crank up nationalist sentiment against foreigners - such as the British, for their criticism of ongoing farm occupations and their stern reaction to an earlier unprecedented breach of diplomatic immunity.

Unfortunately, the British concentration on land occupations played into Mugabe's hands by defining the electoral issue as the legacy of colonial rule and the injustice of white minority privilege (land) rather than political and economic reform. Thus the campaign of farm invasions became both a diversion from the real issues facing the country and a means of intimidating rural voters, who showed signs of backing the MDC at the polls, by creating political "no-go areas".

Since the independence elections of 1980, ZANU PF's electoral success had been due as much to physical enforcement as to political persuasion. Violence in the run-up to the June 2000 elections had not only taken on the form of further invasions of white-owned commercial farms (defying at least three Zimbabwe High Court rulings that these actions were unlawful), but had also increasingly been dominated by clashes between ZANU PF and MDC supporters. The so-called war veterans spearheading the land grab were now in the frontline of a crucial election battle in which the opposition had its best chance so far to dislodge the ruling party. Also, the government had orchestrated violent disruptions of officially organized MDC election rallies, as the party was the first grass-roots formation to pose a real threat to the hitherto unassailable ruling ZANU PF. Indeed, violence was continually escalating and spreading to communal areas, taking the form of the burning of houses and the hunting down of opposition supporters and key organizers.

According to a non-governmental monitoring group, the Amani Trust, there had been 5 048 documented human rights violations (including murders, rapes, and serious assaults on victims) since the announcement of the constitutional referendum result until just prior to the June 2000 elections. In more than 86% of the incidents, the perpetrators were identified as members or supporters of the ruling party. Half of the victims were farm workers whose political affiliations were not known, but many were assumed to be MDC supporters. More than 41% of documented casualties were known MDC supporters, while fewer than 7% of victims were known ZANU PF sympathizers. To stress the seriousness of the situation, observers noted that many casualties were not reported and therefore not documented: "There has been intimidation on such a massive scale that it is wrong to speak of election violence. This is low intensity conflict, much more like what happened in the 1980s in Matabeleland. It is organized violence, strategic violence with the complicity and active participation of the state." Clearly, in such a climate free and fair elections became impossible; significantly, a Zimbabwean state-appointed body, the Electoral Supervisory Commission (ESC), warned that "any hope of holding free and fair elections could fade away if mounting political violence was anything to go by".