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Zimbabwe opposition drops election challenges
Tendai Maphosa, VOA News
March 04, 2005

http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-03-04-voa17.cfm

The Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's main opposition party, has dropped the court challenges of more than 30 cases of the 2000 parliamentary elections.

The MDC has decided not to further pursue legal action because of the impending parliamentary elections on March 31.

David Coltart, the party's spokesperson for legal affairs, said they could pursue the cases beyond the election date but the outcome would not be worth the effort because it has already cost the party an enormous amount of money.

Mr. Coltart said the MDC would now focus on the challenge of the outcome of the 2002 presidential election which Morgan Tsvangirai, the party's leader, lost to the incumbent President Robert Mugabe.

Some international and local observers concluded both polls were neither free nor fair because of the violence that accompanied the ruling Zanu-PF party's campaign.

Mr. Coltart denied that the challenges were an exercise in futility saying it had taught his party a lot in terms of how the government rigged elections.

He also said it is one of the reasons why the regional grouping the Southern African Development Community had come up with electoral guidelines.

The government recently announced the setting up of an Electoral Court which would take up to six months to hear any complaints or challenges related to elections.

Since 2000 when the MDC lodged its complaints, the High Court had only heard 11 cases. The ruling Zanu-PF victories were upheld in three cases and eight results were nullified. But because the ruling party candidates appealed to the Supreme Court, they still sit in parliament less than a month before the next elections.

In the 2000 elections the MDC won 57 of the 120 contested seats in parliament. The party claims that if the courts had acted expeditiously and ordered reruns they could be enjoying a parliamentary majority.

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