zimbabwe today

Monday update: the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is stalling and has not yet released the results, lending credence to opposition claims of a victory. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) has released their own parallel tabulation showing a narrow win for the MDC, but by a margin that may require a runoff. Otto was on Kojo Nnamdi's show on WAMU today; audio available here (he comes on around minute 19 and proceeds to kick ass).

Zimbabwe holds presidential, parliamentary, and local elections all in one fell swoop, today--after an election year marred by violence, intimidation, and utter economic disaster--the inflation rate has now exceeded 100,000 percent. I've been back on the Zimbabwe beat at work recently, trying to facilitate some media advocacy around the elections and their potential aftermath. Early reports are not promising, with evidence that Mugabe's ZANU-PF party may have engaged in the kind of widespread rigging and fraud that have characterized other recent elections in Zimbabwe (2002, 2005).

Here are a few stories/resources you might want to look at:

• Sokwanele/Zwakwana (Enough is Enough) is a Zimbabwean civil society action group; their Zimbabwe Election Monitor dispatches and are essential reading.
• Sokwanele has also set up a GoogleMaps mashup to map violations of voting rights and other breaches of SADC election standards. Ethan Zuckerman has a post about the project that's worth reading.
• Kutubana.net's blog coverage
  
• A meticulous and depressing report from Human Rights Watch.
• Q&A with Timothy Burke
  
• Eyes on Zimbabwe is a short online film about the last March's brutal crackdown on civil society activists (which involved mass arrests and brutal torture in police custody). The website also features resources, op-eds, and background on the crisis in Zimbabwe.

(One of the people featured in the film is Otto Saki, a friend who served as acting director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights last year. He was on CNN international today and will be on assorted NPR affiliates throughout the weekend; I'll post links/clips if I can find them). Thoughts and prayers with those there today, especially B. in Harare.