Johannesburg, South Africa: Events leading to this weekend’s widely watched election in Zimbabwe took an unexpected turn when opposition parties alleged that the Israeli company compiling the electronic voter rolls was linked to the Mossad and was working to sway the vote in favor of Robert Mugabe, the country’s longtime autocratic leader.

Nikuv International Projects, a company that specializes in identification, electoral and government systems, holds a government contract with Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Home Affairs to computerize all identification documents. The ID database compiled by the company was used in Saturday’s voters’ roll.

In an article last week, The Zimbabwean, a weekly independent newspaper promoting democratic change and published simultaneously in London and Johannesburg, alleged that 20 Israelis had arrived in Zimbabwe as “special government guests” “to beef up Mossad support for… Mugabe’s election-rigging plans.” Met by members of the Mugabe government’s Central Intelligence Office, the paper alleges they were “taken to a hideout in the capital” to meet other Mossad and Zimbabwe Electoral Commission officials. It quoted an anonymous government official saying Mossad agents were the “major force… controlling the election process, especially… the counting and announcement of results.”

Representatives of the Israeli government railed against the charges as false. “There is no Mossad involvement whatsoever in Zimbabwe’s elections. This allegation is totally baseless,” Elias Inbram, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, told the Forward on March 30. “There are no Israeli intelligence agents in Zimbabwe, and there has been no interference with the elections held recently,” he said in a statement released April 1.

The statement was issued after pressure for a public response was brought to bear by the African Jewish Congress’s Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft and other leaders of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. They were concerned about the potential damage the allegations could do to Zimbabwe’s tiny Jewish community in a period of intense political uncertainty.

This was not the first time that Nikuv — a subsidiary of Formula Systems, a publicly traded information technology group in Israel — was accused of helping the ruling parties in an African country to rig elections. In 1996, Zambia’s opposition party, the United National Independence Party, similarly accused the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy of trying to rig the elections with Nikuv’s help.

Hoping to avoid last-minute fraud, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party, headed by Morgan Tsvangirai, called results Sunday as they were publicly posted at voting stations nationwide before being sent to the collating center of the ZEC, which is charged with overseeing the elections. Preliminary results indicated a comfortable MDC victory. But official results since released by the ZEC showed the MDC running neck-and-neck with Zanu-PF, Mugabe’s ruling party.

Ibbo Mandaza, a senior member of presidential candidate Simba Makoni’s campaign team, told Johannesburg’s newspaper Mail & Guardian that the Mossad devised the roll, on Mugabe’s instructions. Mossad agents, he alleged, had expertise in vote rigging and had been active in Zimbabwe for the past six months.

Opposition suspicions of electoral trickery with Israeli assistance were heightened when the MDC was handed the voters’ roll electronically. It had been converted into the read-only and unusable PDF format. “The whole idea of PDF is that it’s not manipulable. Giving it in that form is a clear attempt to hide information,” said David Lubinsky, a computer science expert who consulted for South Africa’s electoral commission in that country’s historic 1994 elections.

Moreover, what information was on the rolls was also troublesome. Thousands of “ghost voters,” including people long dead, were discovered on the voters’ register. Opposition figures feared that Mugabe’s party was trying, using the extra 3 million ballots printed by the ZEC, to steal a majority win by stuffing ballot boxes with these names. (Observers from the Pan-African Parliament lodged a complaint with the ZEC on Saturday about 8000 nonexistent voters registered on empty land in a Harare constituency, an MDC stronghold.)

Next, opposition suspicions were heightened by the fact that the PDF conversion software also belonged to an Israeli IT company, Cogniview PL. Speaking in Harare on Thursday, Tendai Biti, Movement for Democratic Change’s secretary general, told journalists that Cogniview provided Mugabe with technical support to rig the elections. “Mugabe and his cronies intend to steal this election through the use of sophisticated software provided by the Israeli company with Mossad connections,” he said.

“I am shocked by this fiction. Neither I nor any of my employees have any links to Zimbabwe,” Yoav Ezer, Cogniview’s chief technology officer, told the Forward. “Somebody in Zimbabwe must have used our software, which is open-source and free to download,” he said.

Efforts to obtain a response from Nikuv in Zimbabwe and Israel were not successful. Udy Erez, general manager of the company’s Harare office, hung up on a reporter when reached.

While not happy about the allegations, Zimbabwean Jews do not believe they were motivated by antisemitism.

“The voters’ roll was shady, so the pre-election situation was sinister to begin with,” one member of Bulawayo’s Jewish community said, dismissing The Zimbabwean story as sensationalist and populist. “If you say the Mossad is involved, it makes it even more sinister.”

By Claudia Braude

Source >  Forward - The Jewish daily

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