Zimbabwe’s Mugabe declared winner, rival challenges poll result

{{Africa’s oldest president, Robert Mugabe, was declared winner of Zimbabwe’s election on Saturday, but his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, said he would challenge in court a result he called a fraud that would push the nation back into crisis.}}

Mugabe, 89, who has ruled the former British colony in southern Africa since its independence in 1980, was formally proclaimed re-elected for a five-year term barely an hour after Tsvangirai announced his planned legal challenge.

“We are going to go to court, we are going to go to the AU (African Union), we are going to go to the SADC (Southern African Development Community),” Tsvangirai angrily told a news conference in Harare.

While African observers from the AU and SADC have already broadly approved Wednesday’s peaceful vote, independent domestic monitors have described it as vitiated by registration problems that may have disenfranchised up to a million people.

The United States, which has imposed sanctions on Mugabe over previous flawed elections and alleged abuses of power, said the evidence of irregularities in the July 31 vote indicated the result was “the culmination of a deeply flawed process”.

“The United States does not believe that the results announced today represent a credible expression of the will of the Zimbabwean people,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

The European Union also expressed its concern. Western election observers were kept out by Harare.

Zimbabwe’s Election Commission announced Mugabe had beaten Tsvangirai with just over 61 percent of the votes, against nearly 34 percent for Tsvangirai.

“Mugabe, Robert Gabriel, of ZANU-PF party, is therefore declared duly elected president of the Republic of Zimbabwe with effect of today,” commission head Rita Makarau told a news conference, drawing cheers from ZANU-PF supporters.

SADC observers have urged Tsvangirai to accept the result. They expressed relief that the elections had so far avoided the kind of violent turmoil that marred a vote in 2008. Then, 200 supporters of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)were killed by ZANU-PF supporters.

{reuters}