Take troops off streets, U.K. urges Zimbabwe
HA RARE• Britain has urged the Zimbabwean government to remove its troops from the streets of Harare after at least six people were killed in post-election violence between security forces and opposition supporters.
The intervention came as Nelson Chamisa, the opposition leader, again claimed that he had won Zimbabwe’s presidential election despite the electoral officials saying they had not completed the process of approval and collation necessary to announce them.
“Announcing it is just a formality,” Chamisa, 40, told reporters in Harare, who said the country’s electoral commission had known the true outcome since Monday.
“We won this election. Mr Mnangagwa knows it. ZanuPF knows it. We have the proof,” he said.
Chamisa, who is seeking to unseat Zanu-PF’s Emmerson Mnangagwa as president, said his MDC Alliance would provide evidence to prove his victory after the release of official results, which were due to be announced late Thursday night.
However, a source close to Mnangagwa told The Daily Telegraph that the results would actually show a victory for the incumbent.
Zimbabwe’s electoral commission yesterday announced that Zanu-PF had taken 145 seats and the MDC Alliance 60 seats in the country’s 210 member parliament.
But it said that release of the presidential results had been delayed by an electoral law that requires representatives of all 23 candidates to check and approve returns from more than 10,000 polling stations.
“There’s absolutely no skulduggery or anything untoward happening,” said Emmanuel Magade, the deputy chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, Thursday when he was asked why the presidential results had yet to be announced.
Legally, officials said they have until Aug. 4 to release results. But the delay has fuelled an atmosphere of mistrust that has already exploded into violence.
Soldiers were seen beating opposition supporters and firing automatic weapons at fleeing civilians after they were deployed to quell violent opposition protests against alleged vote rigging on Wednesday afternoon.
Police said the death toll had climbed to six by yesterday afternoon and that 14 people had been injured.
The violence and the decision to send in the army in response drew widespread condemnation from the international community, which is pressuring Mnangagwa to prove he has broken with the political violence of the Robert Mugabe era.