To my mind, the best development this far is the fact that the UN Security council is to be briefed by MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti. Thabo Mbeki has been doing his level best to keep this off the security council agenda, and for that matter for anywhere where meaningful action might useful, for reasons that continue to escape me.

Interestingly enough the UN did a bit of good here, with somewhere in excess of 200 detained MDC supporters were released once the meeting was on the agenda.

The election in parliament was not close enough to be stolen, MDC has the majority, and the two branches of MDC have, at least for now, decided to reunite.

Mugabe’s security forces appear to escalating attacks on members of the opposition, indicating that this will be a long road to hoe.

The US has come down firmly in favor of an MDC led government, but given the credibility of the US State Department, the obvious response is , “With what army?”

The recount of the votes in the presidential election has been delayed again.

In related news, the head of the electoral commission has renamed himself Godot. (Humor. If you don’t get it, read a bloody book)

Well, it looks like things are going to get worse, Zimbabwe police raided MDC, and the independent electoral observer, offices in Harrare, looking for evidence of an “attempt to overthrow the country”.

This does not look like it will end well.

Hopefully the talk of immunity for Mugabe in exchange for stepping down, talk in which Mugabe has taken no part, will amount to something.

This has been on a gentle slope down for weeks, but I think that there is a cliff up ahead.

We have a good news-bad news situation.

On the bad news side, we have Mugabe sending the state security apparatus to do violence to and to otherwise intimidate the electorate, reports of a humanitarian crisis, what appears to be a
wafe of refugees fleeing the country, and credible reports of
vote theft in the legislative elections.

On the brighter side, it appears that the Chinese arms shipment to Mugabe won’t be unloaded anytime soon, as you have impound orders from banks against the ship, US pressure to prevent offloading of the cargo, dock workers refusing to offload the cargo, and indications that the even the Chinese are backing down on the shipment.

Sane people know that when you get dumped by the Chinese, it’s game over.

Also, it appears that military leaders, and not Mugabe are increasingly making the day to day decisions in Zimbabwe, though it indicates how bad thing are when a slow motion coup d’etat is considered progress.

It also appears that the ANC is firmly turning against Thabo Mbeki’s policy of favoring Mugabe.

In more mixed news, Tsvangirai is appealing for UN intervention, which, as is often the case in such things probably will not make things any better.

Well, the call for a general strike went over like a dead balloon, though I think that the excuse, that too many people are too near starvation to participate, has some validity.

In terms of a runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai says that he will participate if, “a tally verified by both parties and the Southern African Development Community shows no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote”, as he has no confidence in the electoral commission, which is clearly in Mugabe’s pocket.

In terms of the brighter side of this whole mess, it appears that Thabo Mbeki is also a loser in this affair, as members of the ANC, including ANC leader Jacob Zuma’s proxy Matthews Phosa are openly criticizing him. (also here)

This is a good thing. With his unqualified support of Mugabe, and his quite frankly delusional opposition to the use of anti-virals to fight AIDS, Mbeki is well past any usefulness to either the nation of South Africa, or the southern African region as a whole.

The opposition is now calling for a general strike as a result.

Of note, there is also talk of a recount, which appears to be outright vote theft in an attempt to screw with the parliamentary results too.

For what it’s worth, if there is a villian in all of this outside of Mugabe and the ZANU-PF, it’s South African President Thabo Mbeki, who appears to be doing his level best to aid and abet the vote fraud in Zimbabwe.

I think that part of this is the sentiment among Mbeki and the ANC that as a “revolutionary” Mugabe is one of them, and part of this is being driven by electoral concerns: They are concerned that the principle of the democratic defeat of a revolutionary leader might at some later date be applied to the ANC.

The MDC claims that Morgan Tsvangirai won the presidential elextion with an outright majority so a runoff is unnecessary and illegal.

They also have the concern that with only one election on the ballot, Mugabe will pull out all the voter intimidation stops.

Not good times there.

The Zanu PF appears to have lost its parliamentary majority, though it also appears that the MDC Mutambara, while being the plurality party, will be about 2 seats short (out of 200) of an outright majority.

Meanwhile, the MDC Mutambara is now explicitly saying that Mugabe has lost the election for President. From the numbers, I’m not clear if they are insisting that they won outright which still seems a close call, or if they won, but did not get the 50% necessary to avoid a runoff.

It appears that the opposition is now claiming outright victory, and we are seeing denials that there are any negotiations regarding the transfer of power.

As I’ve said earlier, I don’t see Mugabe leaving politely.

The elections results are still delayed, and there is now talk of a presidential runoff. My guess is that the margin was too large for Zanu-PF to make Mugabe the winner, so they are angling for a 2nd round of vote fraud, possibly at a time when foreign attention is elsewhere.

We have reports that the leaders of MDC were in hiding. If the Zimbabwe state security apparatus wants to move, it would have be before the final vote total.

On the brighter side, it appears that thare are negociations between Zanu-PF and the MDC, which implies that there might be a peaceful transition, though I think that Mugabe will be the wild card in all this.

The opposition is claiming victory, but results are coming out very slowly, so my guess is that there will be significant vote fraud.

They have agreed to a power sharing setup. It’s unfortunate that the president of Kenya clearly stole the election, but an end to the violence will benefit everyone.

I haven’t followed this closely, but the apparent agreement of President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition to create a prime minister position may go a long way to defusing this matter.

As a matter of fact though, it’s pretty clear that Kibaki only won the election through fraud.