Zimbabwe

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - After three days of intensive negotiations to resolve Zimbabwe's political crisis, President Robert G. Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai were deadlocked yesterday on the most fundamental issue: which one of them would lead a new unity government. The talks, which began last month with high hopes for a quick settlement, were adjourned with no date set for a resumption. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, the official mediator in the crisis, left Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, yesterday without the power-sharing deal he had hoped to broker.

HARARE, Zimbabwe - She has to call the young men her "comrades." She cooks food for the comrades and serves them. She sweeps the comrades' floor and cleans up after them. And whenever any of the comrades wants sex, she is raped. Asiatu, 21, is a prisoner of the comrades at a command base of the ruling ZANU-PF, one of 900 set up by the party to terrorize Zimbabweans into voting Robert G. Mugabe back into power in the one-man presidential runoff election late last month. The election is over, but the terror isn't.

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - A day after his inauguration for a sixth term as president, Robert G. Mugabe, the runaway winner in a violence-stained electoral race in Zimbabwe, arrived in this Red Sea resort yesterday for an African Union summit, under pressure from the United Nations and his neighbors to negotiate a settlement with his adversaries. Mugabe, 84, flew here as the winner of Zimbabwe's presidential runoff vote, which world leaders called illegitimate because of bloodshed and intimidation, and which African parliamentary monitors said was neither free, fair nor credible.

The government of President Robert G. Mugabe in Zimbabwe was condemned this week in the strongest possible terms for a wave of violence against his political opponents that the U.N. Security Council declared has "made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place" this Friday. Mr. Mugabe's reign of terror has forced Morgan Tsvangirai, his would-be opponent in a runoff election for the Zimbabwean presidency, to withdraw and seek refuge in the Dutch Embassy. A defiant Mr. Mugabe says he plans to go forward with the election, regardless of the international outrage over his behavior.

During the late 20th century, human rights campaigns led by Western progressives helped to liberate two nations on the tip of the African continent from brutal whites-only rule. In 1980, the apartheid regime of Rhodesia gave way to a black-led Zimbabwe. And in 1994, the first multiracial elections in South Africa delivered the presidency to a black man, the longtime anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. In the years since, the two nations have traveled very different paths. South Africa has enjoyed stability, a free press, international investment, an independent judiciary and democratic elections - helped by the graceful exit of Mr. Mandela, who retired after one term.

The despots are having a bloody field day. In Zimbabwe, President Robert G. Mugabe's surrogates continue to terrorize his people for the sin of exercising their free will. Since the March election, when Mr. Mugabe failed to win a majority, Zimbabweans have been harassed, assaulted and attacked, and as many as 65 killed. The mayhem led opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to decamp abroad for seven weeks, and since his return May 24 to compete in the presidential runoff election, he has faced a series of indignities.

PRETORIA, South Africa -- Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai announced yesterday that he had decided to take part in a runoff election against President Robert G. Mugabe, saying that he believes the vote "could finally knock out a dictator for good." Tsvangirai had previously ruled out participating in a runoff, saying he had won outright in the disputed March 29 elections. But in announcing his decision to return to Zimbabwe in coming days, he said that despite the risks faced by opposition activists, it would be a betrayal of Zimbabweans not to contest the second round.

Johannesburg, South Africa -- Nyasha Putana could not help crying in pain as ruling party supporters used sticks to whack his buttocks and soles of his feet in front of hundreds of fellow villagers. At least five people died from beatings at Monday's "political meeting" at Dakudzwa village, about 60 miles north of Harare, in Mashonaland, according to witnesses, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and a human rights worker who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. "They were saying, `We are saving the country by pain,'" said Putana, 32, speaking softly from his hospital bed in Harare yesterday.

Whatever happens in their country during the foreboding days ahead, Zimbabweans know that an "after" is inevitable. An "after Mugabe" will come even if Robert G. Mugabe, the country's 84-year-old president, manages - through a campaign of violence or other means - to claim another term in office. Zimbabwe's political crisis did not begin with this disputed election. Its roots include long-standing limits on free speech, widespread human rights abuses, the failure to resolve issues of land distribution dating from colonial times, cataclysmic mismanagement of the economy, corruption on a gargantuan scale and, not least, the impunity of the wrongdoers.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Zimbabwe's government quickly distanced itself from an editorial in the state-run newspaper yesterday that called for a transitional unity government headed by the country's longtime strongman, Robert G. Mugabe, until new elections could be organized. Zimbabwe has been plunged into political crisis since its disputed elections last month, with the government refusing to announce who won the race for president. Still, the ruling party has repeatedly argued that neither Mugabe nor his chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, won a majority of the votes, forcing the two into a runoff.