despite the South African mediation, in 2007 the country experienced some of the worst violence and human rights abuses.1 It said that there is no doubt that politically motivated violence informs and influences political thinking amongst citizens and, ultimately, voting patterns in favour of those responsible for the violence. This has already tainted the upcoming elections in March. Although most violence has been perpetrated by ruling party supporters in the past, there must also be zero tolerance of violent actions by members of the opposition. Government functionaries and traditional leaders continue to try to force rural people to support the ruling party by withholding, or threatening to withhold, food relief supplies from opposition supporters or threatening to expel them from their villages. 5. Utterances by service chiefs and misuse of the army The commanders of the uniformed services are supposed to be apolitical and should be prepared to serve under any government that is popularly elected. They are not entitled to try to subvert the democratic outcome of an election by announcing before the election that they will not allow a certain candidate to rule even if he wins the election. Regrettably, as they have done in the past, the service chiefs appointed by the Mugabe administration have again thrown their weight fully behind the ruling party’s political campaign. Only weeks before the March 2008 elections, the heads of the army, the police and the prison service, all of whom participated in the liberation struggle, publicly proclaimed that they would not serve any President other than President Mugabe and instructed those under their command to vote for the ruling party. These utterances are a gross abuse of office and are tantamount to treason, as they are in effect threatening to stage a military coup if the people vote out of office the sitting President. They are a complete negation of the right of the people to elect the government of their choice. The statements are a crude attempt to apply undue influence upon voters to re-elect the current President in violation of the provisions of the Electoral Act which prohibit all forms of intimidation and undue pressure. The Head of Police, Commissioner Chihuri, told senior officers to back President Robert Mugabe and reminded them he had given them farms, resources and other perks. Just two weeks before the election, he was quoted as saying that Western supported “puppets would not be allowed to rule”. He went on to say, 1 Here see Appendix 1 for a brief summary of the statistics based on the cases seen by the Human Rights NGO Forum since July 2001. 6