'We rigged Mugabe election'
2003-11-27 09:40
Cape Town - Two former Zimbabwean army officers have claimed that they were forced to help rig the election in that country last year, the Cape Times reported on Thursday.
Former lieutenants Herbert Ndlovu and Primrose Tshuma, who have fled to South Africa after they were reportedly tortured, said they had been forced to fake thousands of postal votes on behalf of soldiers serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They also had to fill ballot forms in favour of Mugabe for purely fictitious voters.
The men allege they were tortured after "baseless accusations" that they had joined the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party.
They reportedly said they decided to go public to "alert the world to the evils of the Zimbabwe regime and how it abused state security organs to entrench itself in power", Cape Times reported.
The men said they were summoned to Zimbabwe army headquarters in Masvingo a month before the March 2002 presidential election and instructed to help fill ballot boxes with false votes.
"I filled in hundreds of ballot papers. There were too many to count, maybe thousands," Cape Times reported Ndlovu as saying.
Ndlovu also explained how the ballots were stuffed in boxes and transported to Harare.
Asked why they had obeyed blatantly illegal orders to rig the elections, Tshuma said: "In Zimbabwe, the terms for a soldier are strict. You have to obey orders."
The consequences of not obeying orders were too drastic to contemplate, they said.