JOHANNESBURG – Southern African leaders on Wednesday called for the postponement of Zimbabwe’s presidential run-off election, joining the United Nations Security Council and Western governments that have called for the vote to be cancelled.

The leaders of Tanzania, Angola and Swaziland, who make the Southern African Development Community (SADC)’s peace and security troika, said holding the election under current conditions would undermine the credibility of its outcome.

"It is the considered opinion of the organ summit that holding the election under the current circumstances may undermine the credibility and legitimacy of its outcome," the troika said after an emergency meeting on Zimbabwe held in Swaziland.

But Zimbabwe's electoral commission said on Wednesday that Friday’s run-off vote would go ahead and rejected attempts by opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from the vote saying his letter of withdrawal was filed too late and had no legal force.

Zimbabwe Electoral Commission chairperson George Chiweshe said: "The Commission sat today, the 25th June 2008 to deliberate on the content and effect of Mr Morgan Tsvangirai's letter. It was unanimously agreed that the withdrawal had inter alia been well out of time and that for that reason the withdrawal was of no force or effect."

Tsvangirai pulled out of tomorrow’s election saying a free and fair vote is impossible under the current climate of violence and intimidation. The opposition leader says 86 members of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party have been killed and another 200 000 displaced by political violence since March.

The Security Council on Monday condemned violence in Zimbabwe and called for tomorrow’s election to be cancelled, while several African countries have also urged President Robert Mugabe to call off the election and instead open negotiations with the opposition for a government of national unity.

United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer joined calls for Zimbabwe’s run-off to be cancelled, saying Washington would not recognise the result of the June 27 vote because Tsvangirai had been violently forced out of the running.

But Mugabe has insisted the election will go ahead, describing the vote as a legal obligation that had to be fulfilled. The Zimbabwean leader who has in the past shunned negotiations with the MDC – which he labels a puppet of the West – said he was willing to talk to the opposition but only after the run-off election.

Meanwhile the SADC election observer mission said members of Zimbabwe’s uniformed forces were committing political violence against supporters of the opposition.

“There are acts of violence being perpetrated by the unformed forces . . . the violence is in some instances instigated by the political leadership,” mission head Jose Marcos Barrica told journalists in Harare.

Mugabe’s government has persistently rejected reports that soldiers and police as well as militias of the ruling ZANU PF party were behind most of the political violence that has gripped Zimbabwe since March.

The government has instead claimed that the MDC was carrying out political violence in a bid tarnish to Mugabe’s name. -- ZimOnline