PEACE & SECURITY | Creating a more stable world
02 May 2008
Zimbabwe Final Vote Tally Has “Serious Credibility Problems”
United States says runoff impossible while violence, intimidation continue
Washington -- The final vote tally released May 2 by Zimbabwe’s Election Commission has “serious credibility problems,” and a runoff presidential vote is impossible when leading opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai and his supporters are facing abuse by President Robert Mugabe’s government.
State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey cited “inexplicably long delays” and “post-election irregularities” that raise serious questions over the credibility of the government-appointed commission’s final vote count.
“This isn't a case of better late than never,” he told reporters May 2 in Washington.
Prior to the release of the vote count, Casey said May 1 that the situation might be different if the commission had released its official results “a few weeks ago.” Zimbabwe’s presidential and parliamentary election was held March 29.
“There’s been an absolutely unconscionable and inexplicable delay in the process of releasing votes. And at this point, I think whatever those results show, they’re probably going to have limited credibility,” Casey said.
“Given these extensive delays and given the lack of any reasonable explanation for them, I think it’s going to be quite reasonable to assume that when people view these results, they’re going to view them with a high degree of skepticism and that they are not going to have the kind of credibility they would have had if they’d been released in a timely manner,” he said.
Tsvangirai, who heads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, has claimed since the March 29 vote that he won more than 50 percent of the presidential vote, thereby avoiding the legal requirement for a runoff vote. The May 2 official tally gave him 47.9 percent to Mugabe’s 43.2 percent, and Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, has agreed to a runoff election.
Speaking May 2, Casey said it was “really impossible as a practical matter” to consider how Zimbabwe would hold a runoff election when “the leading vote-getter is having his party and his supporters regularly harassed and subject to abuse by government officials.”
Mugabe’s government must “cease its repression of the opposition” and others in the country who want to peacefully express their views, Casey said. This must occur as a very first step “before anyone should even think or be able to talk about any kind of runoff election.”
Since President Mugabe’s 28-year rule of Zimbabwe began, the country has seen itself transformed from one of Africa’s leading economies and food exporters into a country that is dependent upon food aid, and with an inflation rate of more than 160,000 percent and an unemployment rate of approximately 80 percent.
U.S. officials have called on the country’s neighbors in southern Africa to use as much leverage as they can on the Mugabe government in an effort to curtail violence in the aftermath of the election. (See also “Time for Zimbabwe’s Neighbors to Exercise Leverage, U.S. Says.”)
