BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (AFP) — Fears of an assassination plot kept Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from the start of his election campaign on Sunday as his party appealed for protection from regional leaders.
Tsvangirai is to face veteran President Robert Mugabe in a June 27 second-round poll, but he remains out of the country amid spiralling violence since he won a first round of voting at the end of March.
After more than a month away, he had been expected in Bulawayo at a rally to launch his latest push for the presidency, but he cancelled his return on Saturday after his party said it had discovered a planned attempt on his life.
The vice president of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Thokozani Khupe, said the opposition was lobbying the 14-member regional body the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to send peacekeepers.
"We are busy putting demands to SADC. We want a monitoring force to make sure there is peace in Zimbabwe," she told a cheering crowd estimated at 8,000 people.
"SADC, the United Nations and the African Union must be here to observe the election and there must be a presence of international media," Khupe added.
Violence has rocked Zimbabwe since a first round of elections in March in which Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe, but not by enough to secure an outright victory.
Pro-government militias have since been accused of harassing and killing opposition supporters, with a host of reports pointing the finger at Mugabe's ZANU-PF party for their involvement.
South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu lent his support to the idea of an international peace force in an interview to be published Monday.
"It would be in the interests of all to send an international peace force to Zimbabwe," the 76-year-old apartheid-era hero told German newspaper Die Welt.
"It's the only way to prevent any violence."
Aides to Tsvangirai have given no date for his return after discovering the alleged assassination plot, but say the former trade union leader will step up his campaign to secure SADC peacekeepers.
The government reacted furiously to his claims of a plot, with Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa accusing him of "behaving like a spoilt child by making such stupid claims."
In comments made to the independent Standard newspaper on Sunday, he added: "He must stop planning his own assassination. He is spreading falsehoods."
Mugabe, Africa's oldest leader, acknowledged last Friday that his loss in the first round of voting in March had been "disastrous" but he began campaigning on Saturday for his re-election with advertisements in state media.
The 84-year-old, who has ruled the former British colony since independence in 1980, lost the first round by 43.2 percent to 47.9 percent and is now fighting for his survival after nearly three decades in power.
Parliamentary elections took place at the same time as the presidential elections in March and ZANU-PF lost control of the legislature for the first time since independence.
"We decided to participate in this run-off ... because we want to give Mugabe a final blow," the MDC's Khupe told supporters in Bulawayo, who were in festive mood, blowing whistles and dancing.
"On June 27 we are burying ZANU-PF and we will put a big slab on its grave so that it will not resurrect."
Tsvangirai has made a series of demands to ensure a free and fair run-off election, including the presence of regional peacekeepers and international election monitors, but these have been largely brushed off by the government.
No Western monitors were allowed to oversee the first ballot and teams from SADC and the African Union were widely criticised for giving it a largely clean bill of health.
Seen as a post-colonial success story in the first decade-and-a-half after independence, Zimbabwe's economy has been in freefall since 2000 when the Mugabe embarked on a land reform programme which saw thousands of white-owned farms expropriated.
Eighty percent of the workforce is unemployed while the official inflation rate in February stood at 165,000 percent -- the highest in the world.
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