Zimbabwe to verify election results amid turmoil

HARARE - Zimbabwe braced on Thursday for the latest twist in a political crisis that has racked the southern African state, with election officials set to verify results from a presidential election on March 29.
Representatives of the four presidential candidates were to attend a meeting with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission starting at 2:00 pm (1200 GMT) in the capital Harare to compare their vote tallies with preliminary official results.
The meeting comes a day after sources close to the electoral commission told AFP that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was ahead in the count, with between 47 and 50 percent of the vote but no outright majority.
More than a month after voting day, no official results from the election have yet been released. Thursday's meeting is expected to lead to the announcement of results but officials could not say when that would happen.
Tsvangirai, 56, was running against 84-year-old Robert Mugabe, a former guerrilla leader and hero of Africa's national liberation movements who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980.
Tsvangirai earlier declared himself the outright winner of the vote based on his party's calculations but Mugabe's camp says a second round will be required to elect a new president.
"We are prepared for tomorrow,... all the candidates' election agents are coming," Utloile Silaigwana, a spokesman for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) said on Wednesday, referring to the meeting on Thursday.
The difference in election figures given by the opposition and those from sources close to the electoral commission meant the potential for discord at the meeting was high but Silaigwana said he did not expect any problems.
Asked earlier what would happen in the event of disagreements over the figures between the different parties, ZEC chief George Chiweshe simply said: "They must agree, they have to agree."
Neither the electoral commission nor representatives of the candidates wanted to speculate on when the final results could be published.
"We will only know when the verification process starts," said Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, a Mugabe ally.
Chris Mbanga, who will represent Tsvangirai at the meeting, said: "It may take one day, it may take two days, it may take one week, perhaps one month."
Election officials earlier confirmed a historic victory by Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change in parliamentary elections also held on March 29, which defeated Mugabe's ZANU-PF for the first time in 28 years.
Critics accuse Mugabe of imposing dictatorial rule in Zimbabwe and running the country's economy into the ground with a policy of often violent land seizures from white farmers starting in 2000.
The government blames the country's economic woes, including inflation at 165,000 percent and an unemployment rate of 80 percent, on sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States.