Further to this post of yesterday, here's Jan Raath in today's Times (£):
Less than 30 years ago, Mugabe's security forces slaughtered up to 20,000 civilians in the western provinces of Matabeleland; they threw them down mineshafts and buried them alive. Mugabe has never shown any remorse for this. In each of the parliamentary elections since 2000 when the MDC [Movement for Democratic Change] first challenged Mugabe, Zanu (PF) has managed narrowly to win one seat out of 26 in the region. Now Zanu (PF) has got 21.
The margin of the Zanu (PF) victory in the parliamentary elections is jaw-dropping. "54 per cent might have been credible," tweeted David Coltart, the distinguished human rights lawyer. "75 per cent is not." We are in the joke realm of 99 per cent election victories of the long-dead Communist bloc and African one-party states of the 1970s that the rest of the educated world - which includes Zimbabwe - is trying to forget.
The joke is particularly sour as Zimbabweans dropped their guard and thought the poll might be more or less fair because there was no serious violence or intimidation in the run-up and the opposition had been left relatively free to campaign.
It is becoming clearer, however, that this project to steal the election was planned over a long time. The key to the Mugabe victory was his tampering with the electoral register. The names of young, urban voters were erased, then the votes of the dead were added, the names of other voters duplicated and the votes of the millions who have fled the economic ruination were restored. Thousands of shaven-headed young men (police and militia recruits identifiable by their tightly folded blankets) were bussed into polling stations to cast these phoney votes.