Till The Bitter End.(Point of View)(Zimbabwe election)

Mugabe may well succeed in holding onto power in the end. But the cost for Zimbabwe will be terrible.

For a few brief days following last month's elections, it seemed the long night of Robert Mugabe's reign over Zimbabwe was ending. Against all odds, opposition parties succeeded in winning a majority in Parliament. But what matters most is the presidential election, and there, neither Mugabe nor his main opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, gained an outright majority. This gave Mugabe room to manipulate the results and to use his militias, youth groups, the police and the Army to ensure he wins a second round of voting.

The brief mood of euphoria is now gone. A climate of fear has returned to this country, which faces economic collapse and catastrophic food shortages. Mugabe, who has ruled for 28 years, has been very clear about his determination to hold power till the end. "No matter what force you have," he once declared, "this is my territory and that which is mine I cling [to] unto death."

The "Old Man," as locals call him, may be 84, but there are still reasons to fear him. He has held onto power by rigging elections, violating court orders, suppressing the independent press and using thugs to attack his opponents. Violence has been his stock in trade for more than 30 years: Mugabe once referred to himself as a "black Hitler" and has boasted of having "a degree in violence." A teacher by trade who has six university degrees, Mugabe was also one of the first black leaders to advocate violence against Ian Smith's white minority regime in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called. Given Smith's intransigence, no other method would likely have succeeded in ousting him. But during the seven-year-long civil war that preceded Smith's overthrow, Mugabe became addicted to the use of violence--not just to establish a new order, but to gain total control over it.

Though Mugabe initially advocated democracy, it was always of a particular type. In 1976, he declared: "Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote and should remain its security officer--its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins."

After winning Zimbabwe's first democratic election in 1980, Mugabe wanted more: the kind of power he would have obtained through a ...