Mugabe’s opponents reject new vote
Published 9:23 pm Wednesday, April 30, 2008
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Zimbabwe’s opposition rejected a presidential runoff election despite a media report Wednesday saying the long-delayed official tally delivered them a victory short of an outright win.
CNN quoted an unidentified senior official with Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF party as saying results from the March 29 election gave opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai 47 percent of the votes while President Robert Mugabe trailed with 43 percent.
The CNN source said the results meant a second round of voting was necessary, since Zimbabwe’s law requires a candidate to win 50 percent plus one vote to avoid a runoff.
In Johannesburg, opposition spokesman George Sibotshiwe said he had heard reports that senior Zimbabwean government officials were saying official results put Tsvangirai ahead by a slim margin. Sibotshiwe reiterated that the opposition would not take part in a runoff because it believed only fraudulent results would deny Tsvangirai an outright victory.
“If Robert Mugabe cannot accept the real results now, what’s the guarantee he’ll accept the real results after a runoff?” Sibotshiwe asked.
Liberia’s president called on her fellow African leaders Wednesday to ensure the results reflect the will of Zimbabweans, warning of the danger of the country’s conflict spilling over into its neighbors in southern Africa.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recalled that her nation’s back-to-back civil wars in 1989-2003 left 200,000 people dead in “a tragedy rooted in suppression of the will of the people and the choice of the people.”
“So I’m one of those African leaders who say to our other leaders and our colleagues, it’s time to do something about Zimbabwe,” Sirleaf said in New York.
Tsvangirai says he won the presidency outright, while independent observers have been saying that he only won the most votes and not the needed 50 percent plus one vote.
In Zimbabwe’s capital, electoral commission officials said that no results had been released and that party officials would not see them until a verification process set to start this afternoon.
Sibotshiwe said the report a runoff would be necessary was part of a government strategy to gear expectations of the need for a second round of voting that Mugabe would engineer in his favor.
