SOUTH AFRICA: Pretoria's election monitoring teams seem anxious to play down the disruption by Mugabe's supporters of opposition rallies, writes Patrick Laurence from Johannesburg
As the major regional power and Zimbabwe's neighbour, South Africa has a central role to play in monitoring Zimbabwe's presidential election and, vitally, in deciding whether to declare it sufficiently free and fair for the result to be designated acceptable.
The importance of South Africa's watching brief in Zimbabwe has been magnified by the European Union's withdrawal of its observer mission after the expulsion of the man appointed to lead its team, Mr Pierre Schori.
Besides those South Africans serving in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Commonwealth missions, Pretoria has two major observer teams in Zimbabwe: the 50-member South African Observer Mission (SAOM), which includes government representatives and delegates from business, labour and civil society, and the 20-member Parliamentary Mission (PM), drawn from most of the parties represented in the National Assembly.
Aside from these teams there is a smaller eight-member squad of observers from the ruling African National Congress and a larger but not wholly South African mission functioning under the auspices of the Johannesburg-based Electoral Institute of Southern Africa.
As the election campaign has intensified ahead of polling next Saturday and Sunday, there is some concern in South Africa, particularly in the ranks of opposition parties, that the SAOM and PM are not audible enough in condemning violent attacks on the opposition carried out by youths of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF. The muted, almost gentle response of the two major South African teams was particularly marked on two occasions when South African observers were caught up in attacks by stone-throwing youths seeking to disrupt campaigning by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
In the first episode two South African observers found themselves in the midst of a hail storm of stones when they were visiting an MDC office in Kwekwe. Their driver - who left to summon the police - was targeted by stone-throwers when he drove off in a marked car. The sole response from Pretoria was to commend the police for arresting two youths, while the leader of the SAOM, Mr Sam Motsuenyane, declined to hold ZANU-PF responsible describing the assailants as "an amorphous mob".
In the second episode members from the PM were part of a convoy of vehicles which were stoned by youths in ZANU-PF T-shirts in the Mugabe stronghold of Chinhoyi. But, while reporting the attack to the police and seeking their protection, the PM leader, Mr Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakulu, refrained from pointing a finger at ZANU-PF.
The reaction of the South African observers so far contrasts with that of the head of the mission that represents the 12-member Southern African Development Community. After the MDC leader, Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, had been arrested for the second time in the past week, the head of the SADC mission, Mr Duke Lefhoko, described Zimbabwe as a country that is in "a state of fear".
It does not follow, however, that the relatively muted response of the missions means they will sanitise the election as free and fair. As Zimbabwe-based university Prof Tony Hawkins has observed, observers have already persuaded Mugabe's government to approve an MDC rally it had banned.
The observers are aware that as they watch the election unfolding they themselves will be under scrutiny, particularly in view of the indiscretion of Mr Tony Yegeni,.the head of the parliamentary mission during Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections in 2000. He paid a "courtesy visit" to Mr Mugabe, allowing himself to be photographed in an ingratiating posture as the Zimbabwe leader smiled benignly at him, a situation interpreted as unqualified endorsement of the election process.