After brutal vote, Mugabe turns to old strategy

JOHANNESBURG - President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe once boasted he had a degree in violence, and he has surely added a doctorate in the savage presidential runoff season that is likely to stagger to a close this weekend with his proclaiming himself the Zimbabwean people's choice despite an election denounced across the globe as a sham.

In the three months since the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai beat him in the general election, Mugabe, 84, has accomplished much of what governing party insiders say he and his coterie of strongmen set out to do in the long delay they engineered before the runoff on Friday.

Soldiers, war veterans, and unemployed youths mobilized by Mugabe's ruling clique have destroyed the ranks of the opposition, with the damage measured in shattered bones, battered and burned bodies, and the corpses of assassinated organizers.

"Violence has left our structures scattered, tattered, and seriously perforated," acknowledged Nelson Chamisa, a member of Parliament and the spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Now that he will have officially won a runoff that Tsvangirai quit with only days to go because of the extreme violence, Mugabe, in power for 28 years, is ready for talks with the opposition. "We want our brothers in the MDC to come to us to discuss our problems," he said at a rally Thursday, exhibiting magnanimity that earlier escaped him.

In that spirit, the opposition's chief strategist, Tendai Biti, held for two weeks in one of the country's filthiest jails on flimsy treason charges, was released last week.

And doctors treating victims of Mugabe's onslaught say torture camps in the Mashonaland provinces, the heartland of the gory campaign of terror, have been closed and the wounded are now straggling into Harare, the capital, for treatment.

The current moment has a familiar quality that has left some Zimbabweans wondering if Mugabe is up to old tricks.

In 1987, after conducting a murderous campaign to crush the forces of a rival liberation hero, Joshua Nkomo, and the people of Matabeleland, the province that was Nkomo's base, Mugabe and Nkomo signed a unity accord that merged the two forces into a single party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, which still rules Zimbabwe.

Historian Martin Meredith explains in his book "The Fate of Africa" that Mugabe's objective was always to establish a one-party state. The question now is whether he can again succeed in bludgeoning an independent force into submission.

There is one major, imponderable difference now: The gruesome violence has been inflicted in the Internet age.

The photographic and video evidence of atrocities is online in real time: the women whose bottoms were beaten for so many hours they've turned deep purple; the men whose backs are pocked with burns from dribbled, burning plastic; the young boys and girls with broken legs and black eyes.

These images, more than anything else, have created a worldwide revulsion with Mugabe and an avalanche of denunciations from Western leaders and some African heads of state on a continent where many have been silent during Mugabe's pitiless decades in power.

But Mugabe is a cunning survivor.

The chief mediator between him and Tsvangirai is South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, who has a complicated relationship with Mugabe that extends back to 1980.

Mbeki has uttered nary a word directly criticizing Mugabe in the past three months and is now pushing hard for Mugabe and Tsvangirai to talk.

Some senior members of Mbeki's own party have said in recent interviews that they think Mugabe has for years outfoxed South Africa's president.

But Mbeki is sticking with the policy of quiet diplomacy he has pursued with Mugabe for the last several years.

South Africa has fought to keep Zimbabwe off the international agenda, and on Friday it opposed an effort led by the United States and Britain to have the UN Security Council condemn the runoff as illegitimate. Instead, the Security Council issued a weaker statement regretting that the runoff wasn't postponed.

President Bush said yesterday that the United States would press the United Nations for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and a travel ban on government officials.

He also said he was instructing US officials to develop broader sanctions against the government of Zimbabwe.

Ronnie Mamoepa, spokesman for South Africa's Foreign Ministry, explained that while South Africa's own liberation movement sought international sanctions against the apartheid regime, Zimbabwe's opposition has not asked for them.

Mamoepa said it did not make sense to impose sanctions now when both sides were already willing to enter negotiations for a political settlement.

Zimbabwe's opposition spokesman, Chamisa, asked if his party favored sanctions, would say only that it sought intensified international pressure.

South Africa's studied neutrality has embittered many in the opposition.

"If Mbeki endorses and legitimizes Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF," said Chamisa, whose mother and grandmother were recently beaten by ZANU-PF thugs, "instead of being part of the solution, he risks being part of the problem."