Zimbabwe: Widespread "intimidation and repression" by Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu PF party has meant free and fair elections will not take place on March 31st, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
In a report released today, the watchdog body claims that with only days remaining before voters go to the polls, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has failed to implement the democratic reforms he agreed to in the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) election guidelines.
The non-governmental organisation's conclusions, which were reached following extensive undercover interviews during two trips to Zimbabwe in December and February, mirror those in a number of other recent reports by rights groups.
Most election monitoring groups have noted that the Zimbabwean government has made some positive steps towards ensuring the election will be peaceful compared to the two previous elections in 2000 and 2002, which were marred by widespread violence.
However, according to the monitoring body the Redress Trust, this is being done solely to bring "an end to the isolation of Zanu PF" from the greater international community.
To date, the EU and US have placed travel restrictions and economic sanctions on high-level members of the party to pressure the southern African country's government into conforming to the SADC democratic principles.
"There is an increasingly bitter and violent intra-Zanu PF struggle for Mugabe's successor, and the solution for Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki [ South Africa's president] is seen to be a controlled handover of power to somebody in Zanu PF who can turn around the economy," said the authors of the Redress report.
HRW accuses the government of Zimbabwe of greatly limiting the ability of the opposition - the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai - to campaign, by restricting freedom of expression, association and assembly in many parts of the country.
"MDC party members and ordinary citizens have been intimidated by ruling party supporters and officials, war veterans, and youth militia. The government has, thus, substantially infringed on the right of Zimbabweans to freely form and express their political opinions.
"In short, due to this climate of intimidation and repression, the playing field for the 2005 election has not been level," says Tiseke Kasambala, the Zimbabwean researcher and the principal author of the report.
The new electoral Act implemented by Zimbabwe's government late last year as a means of accommodating the SADC electoral principles that President Mugabe signed up to last August is also highly criticised by HRW.
The report describes it as "not impartial, inclusive or independent", and maintains that the same partisan electoral institutions that supervised the flawed 2000 and 2002 elections are being used once again in the 2005 poll.
"It is especially disturbing that many retrogressive electoral changes introduced between 2000 and 2002 have been incorporated in the 'new' electoral laws," says Ms Kasambala.
The most notable of these repressive laws are the Public Order and Security Act and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
The former law allows the authorities to disband groups of people who wish to gather for political rallies, while the latter has led to the closure of a number of independent newspapers.
HRW says it based its findings on first-hand reports on electoral conditions in the provinces of Masvingo, Midlands and Matabeleland, as well as visits by members of the NGO to the provinces of Mashonaland and Manicaland and the cities of Harare and Bulawayo.
Researchers were told that thousands of voters had been disenfranchised over the last few months by a manipulation of the voters' roll, which contains 5.6 million names.
Inconsistencies in the voter roll showing a decline of voters in the urban areas, which are traditionally MDC, and increases in rural areas, which are traditionally Zanu PF, were pointed out. These trends are not supported by the country's 2002 census.
"A Zanu PF central committee member admitted to Human Rights Watch on December 14th, 2004, that there had been gerrymandering of constituencies to favour Zanu PF," the report claims.
It recommends that the SADC electoral observer team call on the Zimbabwean government to ensure observers have access to all election sites and are free to move throughout the country.
The NGO also proposes that they prepare a comprehensive and public post-election report on the electoral environment, and that they remain in Zimbabwe for a reasonable period beyond the vote count to monitor possible election-related human rights violations.