Tsvangirai threatens election boycott

Tsvangirai threatens election boycott

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By Angus Shaw

ZIMBABWEAN opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai threatened to boycott planned elections next year as church leaders launched an appeal for democracy Tuesday in the mounting challenge to President Robert Mugabe.

As Mugabe prepared to leave for a southern African summit to discuss the growing crisis, Tsvangirai, leader of a faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said he would boycott presidential elections scheduled next year, unless the vote is carried out under a new constitution that ensures balloting is free and fair.

"We will never go into an election that is predetermined," Tsvangirai said at a memorial service for Gift Tandare, an opposition activist shot dead by police March 11 when they crushed a prayer meeting in the western Harare township Highfield that authorities said was a banned political protest.

Tsvangirai spoke as a rival faction of the MDC led by former NASA rocket scientist Arthur Mutambara rejected claims that a deal had been struck for Tsvangirai to lead a united MDC in a future presidential election.

"There is no truth whatsoever in media reports alleging that a deal has been agreed to field a single Presidential candidate and that the candidate has already been selected," Mutambara said in a statement Tuesday.

Tsvangirai, Mutambara and 48 leading opposition colleagues were taken to hospital after being injured in the police action and allege they were assaulted with clubs and iron bars while under arrest.

About 800 mourners, including opposition leaders wearing bandages and other signs of injuries sustained in clashes with police, sang traditional dirges and gospel songs and waved the opposition's symbolic open hand salute at a church in northern Harare.

Tsvangirai told about 800 mourners there is no going back on a mounting opposition campaign of protests to demand reform and put pressure on Mugabe to step down.

"We will not betray Gift and the people who have sacrificed themselves for the people of this country," he said.

In the most outspoken comment so far, Zimbabwe's Roman Catholic bishops said the crisis has reached a flashpoint and further bloodshed and a mass uprising can only be averted by democratic reforms.

"As the suffering population becomes more insistent, generating more and more pressure through boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and uprisings, the state responds with ever harsher oppression through arrests, detentions, banning orders, beatings and torture," the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference said in an Easter pastoral letter.

"If our young people see their leaders habitually engaging in acts and words which are hateful, disrespectful, racist, corrupt, lawless, unjust, greedy, dishonest and violent in order to cling to the privileges of power and wealth, it is highly likely that many of them will behave in exactly the same manner," the bishops' Easter letter said.

The crisis of governance and high level corruption led to the worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with record inflation of 1,700 per cent, the highest in the world and acute shortages of food, foreign currency, gasoline and essential imports. - AP

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