White Zim MP working to keep Mugabe in power

He campaigned on a platform of black empowerment and "indigenisation" which vilified Zimbabwe's whites as evil colonial overlords hankering after a return to the past. Yet as Robert Mugabe celebrates a seventh term in office there is at least one white lieutenant celebrating with him.

Peter Haritatos was among the 158 MPs from President Mugabe's Zanu (PF) party who were elected last week amid reports of fraud, intimidation and widespread rigging. He is the only one who is white.

Official figures showed that he won his seat in Muzvezve with two and a half times as many votes as in 2008.

"He is a comrade," said Clifford Moromo, a Zanu (PF) party agent in Ngezi, one of the few towns in the constituency, about 100 miles southwest of Harare.

Asked how Mr Haritatos, who owns a commercial bakery and acquired a Rio Tinto gold mine near his home, could have increased his votes from 7,742 to 18,832, his supporters pointed to the public lavatories and shower blocks which he either built or refurbished in his constituency.

"It shows what he has done for the community," Mr Morono added. "He has maintained toilets, drilled boreholes, not to mention the people who beg for food every day at his bakery."

His opponents from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) stayed roughly level, with 3,906 votes in 2008 and just 3,598 last week, reflecting a dismal performance countrywide.

Although the polls were broadly peaceful, local and international observers raised "great and grave concerns" over the secrecy of the voters' roll, a surplus of ballot papers and the number of people who were either turned away, or who asked for official assistance at the polling booths.

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, said results were not credible, Australia called for a rerun and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said he was "seriously concerned" by the irregularities.

"If 25 per cent of people who were eligible to vote were not allowed to vote then the election was fatally flawed," Olesegun Obasanjo, the head of the African Union observer mission, said on Friday. But Mr Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria, added that they had not amounted "to the result not representing the will of the people".

With a two-thirds majority in parliament, Mr Mugabe will now have the power to change the country's constitution and diplomats fear he may undo "progressive measures" introduced during the previous coalition government.

MDC officials said a number of supporters had been forced to flee their homes after Wednesday's polls. Two elderly white farmers were threatened off their land last week, for voting "the wrong way".

Mr Haritatos was born in Greece and moved to Zimbabwe in the 1950s, when European immigrants still faced discrimination from the white Rhodesian settlers. His father was a master baker who settled in Kadoma, 85 miles outside Harare, where Mr Haritatos now runs the Central Bakery and Confectionery.

Although he declined to be interviewed, his wife, Angela, said that he was appointed to the senate by Mr Mugabe, in 2005, to represent Zimbabwe's white minority. "He is a very private person," she said. "He just likes to help our people."

Vice-president Joice Mujuru cited Mr Haritatos as proof that her party was not racist. "We do not hate the skin but the mindset and the system," she told a rally on the last day of campaigning, where she also compared Western charities to the devil.

One Zanu (PF) election poster, printed in the national press, showed a black man carrying a white man across a river with the message: "Lest we forget. Don't let them take you for a ride, again. Vote Zanu PF."

A member of Zimbabwe's Greek community said Mr Haritatos had been "outcast" because of his links to Mr Mugabe's party. "He's really compromised himself by getting thick with Zanu (PF)," he said. "He's got a lot of money and he uses it for political patronage." However, his election co-ordinator Comrade Sanangurai, said he "loved the people as if they were his family".