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16 June 2008
By William Wallis in London
Robert Mugabe has vowed that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change will “never rule Zimbabwe” in a weekend speech that followed a pledge to arm war veterans and send them to fight in the event of an MDC victory.
His most threatening speech yet came at the funeral of an army general just as Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader and his rival in the June 27 run-off, was detained at a roadblock for several hours, and Tendai Biti, the party’s secretary-general, was brought to court to determine whether his arrest last week on treason charges was lawful.
“We shall never, never accept anything that smells of....the MDC. These pathetic puppets taking over this country? Let’s see. That is not going to happen,” Mr Mugabe said. “We are prepared to fight for [Zimbabwe] if we lose it in the same way that our forefathers lost it.”
Mr Mugabe’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric reflects what one senior western diplomat described as a strategy to win the run-off elections at any cost, and what David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, described on Sunday on the BBC as “sadism”.
In recent days the MDC has joined a chorus of rights activists in stating that there is now no chance of anything resembling a free and fair vote.
But Mr Tsvangirai is still attempting to campaign, in the hope that the regime’s brutal tactics – as many as 66 opposition supporters have been murdered, thousands maimed and tens of thousands driven from their homes in recent weeks – will provoke a strong backlash on polling day.
Mr Tsvangirai won a first round of elections in March but with an official tally that gave him less than the absolute majority needed to secure the presidency. His MDC party won a slim victory in parallel parliamentary elections, sounding the first defeat for Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party since the end of white minority rule in 1980.
The regime has since unleashed thugs, war veterans and police to beat up opposition supporters in a campaign of intimidation.
Resorting to increasingly violent threats, Mr Mugabe in effect warned at the weekend of a return to a bush war like the one in which thousands of Zimbabweans died in the 1970s, if he does not get his way.
At a separate rally, he was reported in Zimbabwe’s Sunday Mail newspaper as saying he would be willing at some stage to hand power to a ruling party ally. He gave no timeframe for this, however, and said that so long “as the British still want to come here, I will not grow old; until we know we no longer have sell-outs among us”.-Financial Times.
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