HARARE, Zimbabwe — Ruling party officials claimed a crushing victory Friday in parliamentary elections, but opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai condemned what he called massive fraud and called on Zimbabweans to defend their rights.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change appeared to have lost seats from the 57 it won in 2000. But criticism of the election here and in the West underscored the view that its losses were due to fraud by the regime of President Robert Mugabe.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who earlier this year included Zimbabwe on a list of "outposts of tyranny," said Friday that the vote was neither free nor fair.
"The independent press was muzzled, freedom of assembly was constrained, food was used as a weapon to sway hungry voters, and millions of Zimbabweans who have been forced by the nation's economic collapse to emigrate were disenfranchised," Rice said in a statement.
Mugabe, 81, who has ruled since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, appoints 30 of the 150 members of the House of Assembly. Of the remaining 120 seats, the MDC failed to win the 51 it needed to block the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, from changing the constitution, strengthening its grip on power and preparing the way for a party member to succeed Mugabe.
Reginald Matchaba-Hove of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a nongovernmental group that deployed 6,000 observers, predicted that the opposition would get as many as 41 seats.
After the 2000 elections, which international observers also judged to be fraudulent, the MDC launched a series of unsuccessful legal challenges. This time, Tsvangirai bypassed legal action and appeared to call for some form of protest.
"We are deeply disturbed by the fraudulent activities we have unearthed," Tsvangirai said during a packed news conference. "We do not accept that this represents the national sentiment.... This government has fraudulently once more betrayed the will of the people, led them through a garden path believing that they're going through a process which is democratically transparent and at the end of the day would reveal the true will of the people."
Tsvangirai added, "We believe the people of Zimbabwe must defend their votes, their right to a free and a fair election." But he sidestepped a question on how MDC supporters should defend their vote.
