31 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · Electoral laws are biased and can easily be amended at the whim of the President who may also be a candidate in the election. The law is also applied selectively, as, for example, the use of POSA illustrates. No independent Electoral Commission. Manipulation through use of traditional leaders like chiefs and headmen. No peaceful campaigning. There is no access to the electorate. The government does accreditation of monitors. There is disregard for international standards on how elections should be run. There is lack of transparency in the transportation of ballot boxes to the counting centres. Accreditation of civil servants as election monitors is intimidating, especially in rural areas where they are seen as advocates of the state. Voter registration is a long, tedious and difficult process. The presence of the police and the army at polling stations is intimidating. There is abuse of postal ballots. The voters’ roll is defective. There is usually displacement of people from their constituency. There is confiscation of identity cards preventing people from voting. Thus, it can be seen that the victims, like the youth, are very aware of all the defects in the election of decision makers, and scarcely paint a picture of a country in which elections can be seen to conform to commonly-accepted democratic standards. Popular control over decision makers This clearly was an area in which the victims had very strong views. As they stated, decision makers in Zimbabwe are a law onto their own, as the electorate has no control over them. Once a person has been elected into power they forget that the people voted them in until the next election period. Furthermore, there is generally very poor communication between MPs and the communities as regards what is going on in parliament. The group decided that this was because the electorate is not involved in the initial process of selecting the candidate in the first place. Political parties choose whom they will impose on a particular constituency, and the people end up voting for the party of their choice not necessarily the individual. This is because there is no structure that connects the grassroots people to the executive, and now the opposition has fallen into the same trap. MPs make partisan decisions at the expense of the interests of the electorate. They believe they answer first to the party then to the people who voted them into power. Furthermore, Parliament has too many people who are appointed and not elected47, and since they are not answerable to the people, the people cannot have any control over these decision makers. MPs are in thrall to the Executive, and increasingly everything is fast-tracked through parliament without any consultation with the people. As they put it, parliament just rubber stamps executive decisions and is now powerless. For example the decision to take the army to the Democratic Republic of the Congo was made with absolutely no consultation even with Parliament they were only told afterwards and had no choice but to accent because looking at it from a practical point of view it would not have been possible for the soldiers to return when they had already gone48. 47 48 The President of Zimbabwe is constitutionally able to appoint 30 of the 150 members of the House of Assembly. This view was the majority view at the time, as was demonstrated by an opinion survey of the public’s attitudes to involvement in the DRC war. Here see Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (1998), .HARARE: ZIMBABWE HUMAN RIGHTS NGO FORUM. IDASA: Zimbabwe at the Cross-Roads: Views of Zimbabwean citizens on democracy and transitional justice.