With uncertainty still surrounding the outcome of the Zimbabwean election, many people have everything to lose if Mugabe falls.
By Fred Bridgland

ZIMBABWE has become a militarised state over the past two years as senior army and air force officers were appointed by President Robert Mugabe to top posts previously occupied by civilians, in public institutions such as nationalised companies, the central bank and the judiciary.

So it was hardly a surprise when Mugabe's top three military commanders provided the central pillars of support in the beleaguered head of state's politburo to fight on against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, whose supporters had declared him outright winner of Zimbabwe's March 29 presidential election.

The consequences of the decision to stare down Tsvangirai are unpredictable. Mugabe boasts of his "degrees in violence", but his hardcore sponsors - General Constantine Chiwenga, chief of the Zimbabwe defence forces; Augustine Chihuri, commissioner general of the Zimbabwe Republic Police; and air force chief Perence Shiri - are ruthless men by any standards.

Mugabe will either have demanded the absolute support of the "securocrat" triumvirate before he begins his risk-laden venture against Tsvangirai. Or, conceivably, Chiwenga, Chihuri and Shiri could have demanded a strategy of "no surrender", warning Mugabe that he had either to fight again and remobilise the ruling Zanu-PF party that has kept him in power for three decades, or face abandonment to an uncertain fate.

The general, police commissioner and air marshal know also that they face an uncertain fate if Tsvangirai becomes president in a run-off poll against Mugabe. They have led the police and armed forces in violent crackdowns on civilians that have contributed to the wrecking of a country that upon independence was one of the most bountiful and beautiful in Africa. They could face trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity and see the confiscation of a variety of ill-gotten gains, including farms given to them.

The strategy in coming weeks or months is likely to be a return to the intimidation of the populace - as practised in previous rigged elections since 2000, but more relaxed on this occasion - in the belief that Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will not be able to muster sufficient support to overcome the many obstacles put in their way.

In the first round of voting, Mugabe's most unruly supporters, the so-called war veterans, were noticable by their absence. In three previous rigged elections this century they spearheaded Zanu-PF's campaign, spreading terror wherever they rampaged.

Led by Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, a Poland-trained medical doctor, the war veterans - so called even though many were too young to have fought in the 1970s Liberation War against white Rhodesia - invaded thousands of white-owned farms. In 2000, 19 people were murdered - 12 black labourers and seven white farmers. Countless others were beaten and some were raped.

Hunzvi set an enthusiastic example to his men: he publicly beat MDC supporters with an iron bar and human rights groups accused him of personally torturing Mugabe's opponents in his medical rooms.

The war vets turned out in force for Mugabe in subsequent elections in 2002 and 2005. Ominously, on Friday some 400 of them appeared with an escort of Israeli-manufactured water cannon vehicles in the centre of the capital, Harare, as the Zanu-PF politburo was meeting nearby. Their new leader Jabulana Sibanda, who replaced Hunzvi following his death from Aids, threatened "extraordinary measures" in days to come in support of Mugabe and to defend the country's "sovereignty" against an MDC takeover.

Sibanda, a classic rabble rouser, said: "We are having another invasion like we witnessed in 1890 when Cecil Rhodes's pioneer columns pushed north of the Limpopo River and established the British colony of Rhodesia. White people came with guns and massacred our people who could not defend themselves with assegais spears. This time around it's a different situation. We will not sit back and watch."

Sibanda did not specify whether the white invasion he is now referring to were farmers driven off their land since 2000 or journalists who entered the country to report on the presidential election.

He also warned of action against the MDC for having claimed victory in the presidential race before the result is announced by the government- controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. "We are disturbed by statements being made by the opposition claiming victory," he said. "We will not sit back and count our fingers while they make such statements. We are going to take action."

The reappearance of the war vets, wielding posters in support of "The Fist" - Mugabe's campaign slogan - could only have happened with the approval of Mugabe and the securocrats. It suggests that Mugabe and his men are planning a violent fight, if necessary. On Saturday, MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa appealed to the United Nations to help the country prepare for a presidential run-off, saying he feared the "vampire instincts" of Mugabe.

Chamisa said Zimbabweans "need the international community to help us", and that the UN should not wait to "come when there is blood in the street, blood in the villages".

The huge delay by the electoral commission in announcing a presidential victor has led to deep suspicions of vote tampering and international criticism, with the MDC attempting to go to court to try to force the government to release the results.

From its own tally of vote totals posted at each polling station, the MDC argues that Tsvangirai eked out a bare 50.3% majority, enough for him to be elected without a run-off. But while independent projections of the result by local democracy advocates put Tsvangirai well ahead of Mugabe, they say it is not by enough to avoid a second round of voting.

Chamisa's fears of violence have basis in the past. In 2000, some 350,000 landless peasants invaded white farmland in the wake of the war vets. They failed dramatically to produce crops to feed their countrymen. They were subsequently driven off the best farms by the security forces, and prime properties were re-allocated to the president, his close relatives, ministers, top judges, the armed forces, police officers and pliant journalists and clergymen. These farms are now mainly used as weekend retreats and, for the most part, have ceased to be productive.

In a typical example, 96 peasant families who settled on the state-of-the-art Eirene Farm at Marondera, 50 miles southeast of Harare, were forcibly removed when Mugabe allocated the property to air marshal Shiri. The farm was originally the property of Hamish Charters, who was driven from his home and beaten up, sustaining a skull fracture, by men wielding AK-47 rifles.

Under a Tsvangirai presidency, Shiri would be certain to lose Eirene Farm and others he took from their previous owners. (Charters would be unlikely to get it back, because Tsvangirai is committed to a fair and equitable reallocation of land, an issue that was at the heart of the 1970s liberation war.) Shiri would also be stripped of his directorship of Osleg, a Zimbabwean military company exploiting diamonds in the Congo.

But the 53-year-old air marshal has more to fear than the loss of diamond mines and farms and their equipment he acquired for nothing.

Gukurahundi is a term in Zimbabwe's native Shona tongue meaning "the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains". It was also the name given to a military crackdown in rural Matabeleland in the 1980s in which an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people were killed, most of them peasant villagers.

The massacres and burnings of peasant huts and properties were carried out by the notorious North Korean-trained 5th Brigade, answerable only to Mugabe and not the army hierarchy. Its commander was Shiri, then an army colonel known by those who feared him as "Black Jesus".

A report, based on a five-year investigation by Zimbabwe's Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, said of the Gukurahundi massacres: "Most of the dead were killed in public executions involving between one and 12 people at a time, often being forced to dig their own graves in front of family and fellow villagers."

Shiri also co-ordinated the forcible occupation of white-owned farms by Hunzvi's war vets, whose ranks were believed to have been reinforced by former 5th Brigade soldiers.

Human rights groups have demanded that Shiri, who was born in the same village as Mugabe, be tried for crimes against humanity. One such group, the Bulawayo-based Ibetshu Likazulu, commemorates the Gukurahundi killings on January 20 each year. Its chairman, Qhubekani Dube, is demanding that Mugabe and Shiri be tried for the 5th Brigade massacres.

"Nothing has ever been officially made public," said Dube. "What we only have are eyewitness accounts. What is Robert Mugabe hiding? We will never rest as long as the truth is not told about why this terrible thing happened."

If Mugabe and Shiri are ever to be tried it will have to be in Zimbabwe, not before the fledgling International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which is prevented by its founding July 2002 statute from investigating any alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed before that date.

However, under any post-Mugabe administration, tens of thousands of people will loudly demand justice and revenge in a domestic court, or in some kind of justice commission, for the myriad crimes committed in the Gukurahundi crackdown.

But there is one other issue that might just see general Chiwenga and commissioner general Chihuri indicted, perhaps even with Mugabe, by the ICC's chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Operation Murambatsvina - translatable as "drive out the trash" - in which more than 700,000 homes of poor town-dwellers seen as supporters of the MDC were destroyed, happened in 2005, within the period of the ICC mandate.

Ostensibly a slum clearance project, Chiwenga and Chihuri directed the assault by soldiers and policemen in which houses were wrecked by bulldozers and sledgehammers. Police chief Chihuri boasted that Murambatsvina was designed to "clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy".

If a new head of state makes Zimbabwe a signatory to the 2002 Rome Treaty that underpins the ICC, Mugabe would be eligible for trial in the Dutch capital for alleged crimes against humanity in relation to Murambatsvina.

As Mugabe, Chiwenga and Chihuri cling to power, they will surely be considering whether they can negotiate with Tsvangirai - should he become president - amnesty for crimes while in office. But any promises given by Tsvangirai might be worth little. There is nothing to stop Murambatsvina victims petitioning Moreno-Ocampo, a former Argentinian human rights lawyer, to prosecute Mugabe and his security chiefs: he would be legally obliged to investigate.

An estimated 2.5 million people were made homeless by Murambatsvina in the middle of Zimbabwe's short but freezing winter of 2005. Many were forced to destroy their own homes at gunpoint. No-one knows how many died as a direct result of the operation.

One thing that is known is that Zimbabwean women now have by far the lowest life expectancy in the world - just 34 years compared with nearly 60 at the time of independence in 1980