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March 29 election post mortem - Maps & analysis of trends, patterns & predictions for run-off
Zimbabwe Peace Project
June 06, 2008

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Introduction

While the run up to the 29 March 2008 harmonized elections was relatively calm, scenarios in the post election period reflect a far cry from this. The post election era witnessed frightening increases in politically motivated violence with 4359 cases having been recorded in April 2008 by Zimbabwe Peace Project, indicating a 470% increase in monthly recordings from pre election levels of 795. The nature of violence has shifted from incidental election violations to systematic and organized forms characterized by increases in malicious damage to property, torture, abductions, rape, displacements. Manifest in these new forms is the need to inflict permanent harm on the victim. These phenomena, if not urgently curbed, are set to disenfranchise a very significant percentage of the voter population in Zimbabwe! The Zimbabwean voter is at high risk of being short changed!

Also disquieting is that this violence scourge, just like an infectious disease, is fast spreading from the traditional hot spot zones of Manicaland, Midlands, Mashonaland East and Masvingo to the other provinces of Mashonaland Central and Mashonaland West. Even the relatively calm provinces of Matebeleland North, Matebeleland South and Bulawayo are slowly bulking to politically motivated violence.

Viewed from this backdrop, the resuscitation of Violations Early Warning Systems [VIEWS] in 2007 by the Zimbabwe Peace Project was indeed a timely intervention. It heralded a paradigmatic shift from short term, urban biased, ad hoc, and reactive monitoring approaches to broader, more proactive, systematic and long term monitoring and documentation practices. Earlier monitoring approaches tended to reduce elections to events on the polling day- a fixation that seriously compromised capacity to capture and unravel the entire dynamics of election violence-hence the often heard premature conclusions on electoral processes!

Country-wide, rural-focused and long term pre and post monitoring systems are needed to pick trends and patterns that would help predict levels of violence in impending elections. They are also needed to generate a credible data base from which to provide timely warning signals on any practices that pose a threat to the voter's inalienable right to determine his/her socioeconomic destiny. Respect for citizen vote is critical to political stability, democratic governance and socioeconomic development.

In line with this approach, ZPP has put in place a three-tier country-wide information gathering network comprising Monitors, Provincial Coordinators, and Investigators - an operational framework that has placed these actors in a strategic position to quickly verify evidence in terms of source, circumstances, perpetrators and victims before relaying information to ZPP offices for documentation. Underlined here are visible attempts by the ZPP to inculcate and nurture practices of credibility, transparency and accountability in its information gathering and documentation processes. Information gathered from these monitoring activities has since last year been released through VIEWS, Information Alerts and related reports.

This Report reviews these documented reports in an effort to enrich ongoing protracted efforts by ZPP to create a more peaceful, humane and voter-friendly post election era. This entails reviewing trends and patterns of violence, mapping torture bases, and on the basis of past practices, make tentative predictions on post 29 March 2008 election violence.

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