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Mugabe faces pro-democracy push from powerful neighbor, South Africa
Celia W. Dugger, New York Times
June 10, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/world/africa/11zimbabwe.html?_r=1

As heads of state from across southern Africa meet here Saturday to wrestle yet again with Zimbabwe's intractable crisis, the country's 87-year-old strongman, Robert Mugabe, is facing a new reality: a strong and very public pro-democracy line from the region's most powerful country, South Africa.

The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, laid down the law at a meeting of regional leaders in March, saying the violence, intimidation and politically inspired arrests must stop and conditions for free elections be met. Lately, an adviser to Mr. Zuma has been taking up the theme, bluntly declaring that it is time democracy came to Zimbabwe.

"The simple fact is that people are tired," Mr. Zuma's adviser, Lindiwe Zulu, said in an interview on Wednesday. "People want to see democracy. People need their voices to be heard. Those are the winds that are sweeping the continent, and people ignore them at their peril."

On Saturday, Mr. Zuma's approach faces a critical test: will African leaders, many of whom have cozy relationships with Mr. Mugabe, back Mr. Zuma's insistence on elections free of the violence that Mr. Mugabe's party, Zanu-PF, has used to stay to power for three decades? Will Mr. Zuma hold firm?

Long accustomed to being treated with exquisite deference by South Africa, Mr. Mugabe is not going quietly. He has said he is tired of sharing power with his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, and wants to run for president again this year.

And he has lashed out at Mr. Zuma, chosen by the region as its broker in the Zimbabwe negotiations. He has dispatched his key lieutenants - men who human rights groups say are implicated in crimes against humanity - to lobby the leaders assembled here this weekend.

The state news media he controls have sharply criticized Mrs. Zulu, Mr. Zuma's adviser. Columnists in The Herald have labeled her as, among other things, reckless, loquacious, incompetent and dangerously partisan. One writer quoted unnamed sources saying, "Mr. Zuma agreed that indeed 'the girl's wings should be clipped.' "

But this barrage has not silenced Mrs. Zulu, 53, an experienced member of the governing African National Congress who studied journalism in Moscow in the 1980s on an ANC scholarship, joined its armed wing in exile before the end of apartheid and served as a party spokeswoman during the 1994 election that made Nelson Mandela South Africa's first black president.

As to the attacks on her in Zimbabwe's state news media, Mrs. Zulu said, "It's very unfortunate, but we are not moved." She ventured that it would take "a miracle" for Zimbabwe to be ready for elections this year. Asked about the possibility that Mr. Mugabe would call elections without the support of the Southern African Development Community, or S.A.D.C., the regional body, she replied, "I don't think the president would like to go against an S.A.D.C. decision."

But the task of ensuring free and fair elections in Zimbabwe is a daunting one. Mrs. Zulu said the basic institutions that were supposed to guarantee a clean election and ensure a free press still needed strengthening.

The Movement for Democratic Change, led by Mr. Mugabe's rival, Mr. Tsvangirai, has demanded an overhaul of the military and the police, still under Mr. Mugabe's control - a demand Mr. Mugabe recently dismissed as "nonsense."

Human rights monitors have reported that soldiers have been deployed to the rural areas in recent months to strike fear into the hearts of those considering voting against Zanu-PF.

And researchers at the South African Institute of Race Relations, a nonprofit group based in Johannesburg, said in a report released Monday that the state of Zimbabwe's voter rolls makes fraud virtually inevitable. The institute said it obtained a copy of the complete voter rolls from sources who could not be named for "the usual Zimbabwean reasons" - that doing so would put their physical safety at risk.

It estimated that the current voter roll - which lists 5.7 million people - is most likely padded with more than two million nonexistent voters. Millions of Zimbabweans have fled the country over the past decade to escape repression and a crippled economy. The institute estimated the current population at 10 million.

"Such fictitious votes could be added to totals wherever Zanu-PF was vulnerable," R. W. Johnson, author of the institute's report, wrote.

The institute also documented what it described as large numbers of exceptionally old people on the voter rolls, especially for a country where life expectancy has fallen to age 47. There were 41,119 centenarians registered.

"This is an impossible figure," Mr. Johnson wrote.

He noted that Britain, with a population six times larger than Zimbabwe's and a life expectancy more than 30 years longer than Zimbabwe's, had a quarter as many centenarians as are listed on Zimbabwe's voter rolls.

And more astonishing, the report stated, were the 16,828 voters who were 110 years old and shared a birth date: Jan. 1, 1901.

"However, if one's credulity is stretched by this extraordinary number of 110-year-olds," Mr. Johnson continued, "it is stretched way beyond the breaking point when one learns that no less than 1,101 of these 110-year-olds are registered in Mr. Mugabe's birthplace, Zvimba, presumably to act as a reserve category capable of producing particularly pleasing results for Zanu-PF there."

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