From the cauldron of the surreal that post-election Zimbabwe has become, and some of the features of which I have been trying to document on normblog, I have to say that I missed this, noted yesterday by R.W. Johnson, glaringly obvious as it is once pointed out:
[T]he Mugabe regime's contradictory position is firstly that the presidential vote needs to be recounted before it can be announced and secondly that there needs to be a presidential runoff. This second proposition can only be valid if in fact they know the results of the first round.It's a beauty, is it not? If such a word can be used with reference to a land now so brutalized:
It is called Operation Makavhoterapapi - Shona for 'Where did you put your cross?' - and it descended on 15-year-old Privilege Chikwana as she was doing her homework. Privilege was too young to have voted in Zimbabwe's still unresolved election but her mother did and the men at the door suspected she voted the wrong way. So they took the child back to the school in Chiwaka village where scores of Zanu-PF activists were holding opposition supporters prisoner and started beating her."They beat her on the buttocks with wooden rods, beat her and beat her because they said she was hiding me. Men were doing this," said Privilege's mother, Faustina Chikwana. "When I heard they had taken her to the school I went straight there. There was a big group of Zanu-PF, about 100. They had drums. They were singing. They grabbed me and they had a list of where we voted. That's when it started."
Chikwana and her daughter are now in a private Harare hospital hardly able to move because of the injuries inflicted on them as a wave of state-sponsored terror sweeps rural Zimbabwe to punish voters for supporting the opposition and to ensure that if there is a run-off presidential election they do not repeat their mistake. Scattered around the same hospital are others who have survived the systematic punishment beatings and burnings but with terrible injuries.