Security forces on full alert for tense Zimbabwe vote

Security forces in Zimbabwe went on full alert Friday, a day before elections that are the most serious challenge yet to the 28-year rule of President Robert Mugabe.

The country's national police chief, Augustine Chihuri, told a news conference in the capital Harare that the security forces would not let violence, coercion or protests disrupt the voting.

Israeli-made armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets of Harare and Chinese-made fighter jets screamed overhead as the police chief was speaking.

A divided opposition is facing Mugabe's ZANU-FP party, which is blamed by many observers for Zimbabwe’s dismal economic performance in recent years.

Inflation in the once relatively prosperous southern African country is running at 100,000 per cent. Eighty per cent of the adult population is unemployed and nearly 4,000 people die every month from HIV/AIDS.

Mugabe, 84, led Zimbabwe to independence from rule by a tiny white minority in 1980. In recent years, his government has become increasingly authoritarian, redistributing land from white-owned farms by force and ejecting slum dwellers from shanty towns around Harare.

Opposition political parties, human rights activists and journalists have been harassed, arrested and beaten up.

Mugabe resoundingly won the last elections — in 2005 — in what most observers believe was a massively rigged poll.

Opposition fears rigging

There are widespread fears among Zimbabweans and international agencies of a similar strategy planned for this election.

CBC's Adrienne Arsenault is one of a small number of western journalists allowed into Zimbabwe to cover the elections and she says people are highly skeptical that the voting will be free and fair.

"President Robert Mugabe has been handing out cars to doctors, tractors to farmers and that's seen here as a classic attempt to buy more votes," Arsenault said.

"There are 5.9 million people registered to vote but nine million ballot papers printed," she said from Harare. "People believe this is simply a matter of the ruling ZANU-PF filling in what they want to grab this election yet again."

The main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has said he would win a free and fair vote, and he has warned of the possibility of violence similar to the bloodshed in Kenya after last year’s disputed polls there.

"He [Mugabe] knows that if he goes that blatant route what happens the day after?" Tsvangirai told London’s Financial Times newspaper on Friday.

"He can declare himself the president of the country [after a rigged election] but the following day the crisis will be looking him straight in the face," the opposition leader said.

Mugabe is equally bellicose in warning his opponents not to protest if they lose.

"Just they dare try it," he said at an election rally the week.

Human rights organizations are watching the elections closely, but from the outside. No well-known international groups are being allowed into Zimbabwe to monitor the vote.

Alexis Kontos of Amnesty International Canada said he is particularly concerned with the behaviour of the security forces in the run-up to the vote.

Kontos said in one incident, opposition campaigners were forced by police to take down election posters and chew and swallow them in front of armed officers.