Opposition Claims Win In Zimbabwe On Unofficial Tally

HARARE, Zimbabawe — Zimbabawe’s main opposition party claimed a landslide victory on Sunday, insisting that unofficial results showed that the Movement for Democratic Change had unseated Robert Mugabe, the man who has led this nation for 28 years. But the nation’s chief elections officer warned that such boasts were premature and asked the nation to wait for the results to be officially collated and verified.

Most people did just that, listening for vote totals on the government radio and television stations. For their trouble, all they got was music and soccer matches.

The unofficial vote totals were posted at most polling stations soon after counts there were completed, and were spread through the rumor mill, passed along on cellphones from one part of the country to another. Independent election observers and journalists who saw some of the results confirmed what many ordinary people were reporting: that the opposition appeared to have won by wide margins at the polling sites they saw, including some places considered traditional strongholds of the government.

The M.D.C., using the posted totals, claimed victory for their candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. “We have won this election,” Tendai Biti, the party’s general secretary, told diplomats and reporters at a briefing early Sunday. “The trend is irreversible.”

Later in the day, he listed one constituency after another where M.D.C. candidates had triumphed in parliamentary and local elections. He tempered his exultation with the caveat that nothing was official until reported by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, a body dominated by Mr. Mugabe’s appointees and commonly accused by the M.D.C. of being the apparatus used in rigging the polls.

Mr. Biti said that M.D.C. officials had tried to monitor the election process at the commission’s headquarters but said they saw the election commissioner, George Chiweshe “running away” and were left with “four girls pretending to type.”

In the 2002 presidential race, the M.D.C. claimed that the outcome was stolen from Mr. Tsvangirai when the election commission dumped fraudulent votes into the governing party’s column at the last minute. That, the opposition said, left Mr. Mugabe as the winner. Now 84, he presides over a nation where most of the population is unemployed and the economy suffers the world’s worst inflation.

Mr. Biti worried aloud that a similar fraud may be occurring. “In some areas where we thought the results were final, some ballot boxes are actually missing,” he said.

Nevertheless, those who’d be pleased to see Mr. Mugabe go were thrilled with the early, if greatly incomplete, news coming in from across the country.

“The key has always been to get the results posted at the polling stations,” said Mike Davies, a longtime community activist with the Combined Harare Residents Association. “If the results are posted, it becomes so much harder for Mugabe to cheat.”

But he too was cautious. “It’s hard for me to believe that Mugabe will go peacefully,” he said. “When autocrats fall, that’s the most dangerous time.”

Mr. Mugabe, a hero of the nation’s liberation struggle and one of Africa’s last autocratic, so-called big men, has overseen an economic freefall that began in 2000 when the government seized agricultural land owned by whites. About a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people have fled the country; 80 percent to 90 percent of those left are unemployed.

With an inflation rate of more than 100,000 percent, people go shopping with heavy bricks of cash, paying 30 million Zimbabwean dollars for a soft drink, for instance.

But Mr. Mugabe’s government controls the news media here and has doled out food and other favors that critics contend is vote buying.

Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, received 42 percent of the official vote in 2002. Last March, he was badly beaten by the police at a prayer rally but in this election he has campaigned largely without interference, speaking to huge crowds.

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