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On
restoring national institutions and elections
Research
and Advocacy Unit (RAU) and Idasa
March
23, 2012
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When election
fever begins to afflict Zimbabwe, there are usually two major issues
that have emerge strongly: an end to political violence and intimidation,
and the lack of a wholly independent electoral machinery. Both have
been shown to underpin the four flawed elections held since the
2000 Constitutional Referendum. However, important as it may be
to stress the need for independent electoral machinery and non-violence,
there is also the general observation that the probabilities of
electoral fraud increase as much as a function of the lack of basic
democratic freedoms and rights as they do with the lack of an independent
implementing authority, and offer broader problems than mere violence
and intimidation. As Lopes-Pintor, for example, has commented:
Electoral
fraud is most likely to occur during elections in countries where
basic freedoms and rights are not sufficiently guaranteed. From
this starting point, the following hypothesis can be formulated:
if electoral fraud is most likely to occur in countries where
freedoms and rights are not sufficiently guaranteed, and elections
in most countries today are still held under these conditions,
then electoral fraud is to be expected in many elections around
the world. The amount and severity of the fraud depends on the
ability of government, the international community, and other
social institutions (political parties, independent media, civil
rights advocates, monitoring organizations, etc.) to effectively
protect the freedoms and rights of voters and candidates.
Zimbabwe would
undoubtedly fit the typology of a country in which basic freedoms
and rights are not guaranteed, and indeed, since 2000, Zimbabwe
has consistently been described in the annual Freedom House reports
as a country that is 'not free'. Zimbabwe is also a
country that has in the past decade received failing grades for
the elections held over this time, but not universally condemned,
however, for these elections. Whilst the US, the European Community,
and the Commonwealth (to mention a few) roundly condemned the elections
in 2000 and 2002, the AU, SADC and other countries have endorsed
these elections, at least until the Presidential re-run in June
2008, when virtually nobody could say a good thing about it or recognise
the result.
However, the
problem is that elections, important as they are in Zimbabwe, have
become crucial in determining the legitimacy of the ZANU PF regime
in the eyes of the AU and SADC. As was commented
in 2005:
While elections
are not the only rubric for determining the legitimacy of a state,
they have become increasingly important. In Zimbabwe, in the past
five years, elections have been elevated to the only constitutive
principle for determining legitimacy, aided considerably by the
position of the African nations, and South Africa in particular.
The rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, human rights
and good governance, while generally accepted as additionally
crucial to legitimacy and democracy, have been minimised in the
Zimbabwe context by African countries, but not by the Western
world in general. African countries, frequently led by South Africa,
have been responsible not only for validating elections, but also
for quashing motions in international meetings that would have
been condemnatory of Zimbabwe's recent record in the observance
of human rights and the rule of law.
These observations
on the 2005
Parliamentary election remain as pertinent today, especially
with the possibility that the next purported elections will probably
resemble 2005 rather than June
2008 or March
2002. The reference to 2005 is important, for, whilst overt
violence creates no problems for observers in determining the validity
of elections, the more subtle combinations of intimidation, treating,
and poll rigging are not similarly simple to detect. In 2005, the
lack of overt violence was treated as a vast improvement on the
previous elections in 2002 and 2000, even by the MDC's own
admission. However, more careful monitoring and analysis indicated
that the election was considerably less than acceptable.
As was demonstrated
by careful statistical analysis, the violations of freedoms of assembly,
association, and movement, some political violence (and considerably
more intimidation), and the political use of food aid were all significantly
related to the presence in constituencies of state agents, militia,
and militia bases. And these two sets of variables were noticably
more present in constituencies lost by ZANU PF in 2000, and then
won by ZANU PF in 2005. However, the important point to make here
is that the monitoring in 2005 had focused on more subtle indicators
of electoral fraud - intimidation, threats, discrimination in humanitarian
assistance, etc. - rather than the more gross indicators that had
received enormous attention in the two previous elections, and had
shown that intimidation could sway a result.
However, it
is also important to bear in mind that the elections proposed by
Mugabe for 2012 may well not resemble 2005, and could rather resemble
2002 or 2008. The rationale here is that Presidential elections,
because of the over-weaning powers of the Presidency, raise the
stakes enormously, and seem inevitably to require massive violence,
and, when every survey for the past three years shows Robert Mugabe
trailing Morgan Tsvangirai by dozens of percentage points, the probability
of a violent election must be high.
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