HARARE (AFP) — Authorities in Zimbabwe have rejected opposition and international calls for additional election observers for the second round of presidential elections due on June 27, state media said on Saturday.
"The invitations we sent at the beginning are still valid. There would be no further invitations," Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, was quoted as saying by The Herald newspaper.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai made international election monitors one of the conditions of his participation in the run-off, as well as the deployment of regional peacekeepers.
No Western monitors were allowed to oversee the first ballot and teams from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) were widely criticised for giving it a largely clean bill of health.
For the first round of polling Zimbabwe invited 47 teams of monitors from regional organisations, as well as from countries including China, Russia and Iran with whom Mugabe enjoys relatively good relations.
Western monitors from the European Union and the Commonwealth have been sidelined. They denounced as flawed the last presidential election in 2002, which saw Mugabe win a new term in office.
An independent local monitoring agency, one of a handful of local groups who were authorised to observe the elections, said Friday that some of its observers were now too scared to monitor the upcoming poll due to fears for their security.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network (ZESN) said dozens of its observers had been assaulted by suspected Mugabe supporters since the first round of elections.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has also demanded the end of violence in the run-up to the vote and a revamp of the electoral commission, which it accuses of bias towards the incumbent.
Violence has spiralled since the first round of polls, with the MDC reporting at least 32 activists killed. They accuse Mugabe of orchestrating a campaign of terror.
But Mugabe has accusing the MDC of fomenting terror in the countryside.
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