No Orange revolution in Zanzibar

Secondly, the elections were postponed last month on account of the death of opposition vice presidential candidate Jumbe Rajab Jumbe, This again shows that Africa is moving in a positive direction as one could rather have expected the government of going ahead with the elections to gain mileage from the death of rival candidate.

Thirdly, Jakaya Mrsho Kikwete, a Muslim has been elected as the president; his running mate Ali Sheni, the incumbent vice president was also a Muslim, and so was his main presidential rival Ibrahim Lipumba. Given that in Tanzania, Christians outnumber the Muslims, this seems to be an indicator of the tendency towards secular issue-based democracy gaining roots in Africa.

But the flip side of the democracy-Tanzanian-style was witnessed last month in Zanzibar. The postponement of elections in Tanzania did not extend to Zanzibar, where the election commission decided to hold them on the original date. After the elections in Zanzibar, the newspapers around the world showed pictures of opposition supporters drenched red in blood due to police beatings. Not only were the pictures nauseating, one would have liked to request a World Health Organization enquiry to arrange for a medical check up of the persons who ordered this brutality, to ascertain if they were humans or beasts.

Tanzania is a forced union of the mainland Tanganyika and the twin-island state of Zanzibar and Pemba. The rivalry in Zanzibar between the ruling pro-union Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party and the opposition pro-autonomy Civic United Front (CUF) is much deeper than a divergence of political program or election manifesto, like between Labour and Conservative in the UK, for instance. The roots of this hatred are historical, racial, and ideological.

The present-day Zanzibar, a former centre of the spice and slave trades, had four waves of settlements; the original settlers were Bantu-speaking Africans; the next incomers were Arabs, particularly Omanis; then came the Europeans, mainly the British, and it was during the British time that Indian labour was transported and settled on the plantations in Zanzibar. So the present-day Zanzibar is infused with African, Arabic, European, and Indian influences.

The influence of Arabs who initially set up trading colonies was to be paramount. In 1832, the Omani Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibarby now a major slave-trading hubmaking it an independent Arab sultanate. For a time, the Sultan controlled major chunks of the coastline of mainland Tanganyika as well. In 1862, he laid foundation to the city of Dar-es-Salam, the present day capital of Tanzania.

The slave trade was abolished in 1873, and when the Germans made mainland Tanganyika their colony, the British countered by declaring Zanzibar as their protectorate in 1890. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, even mainland Tanganyika was acquired by the British under the League of Nations "mandate" system.

The United Nations upheld this system in 1946 and converted the Mandate to British Trusteeship. When Tanganyika gained independence, the Sultan signed his own suicide warrant by asking the British to terminate the protectorate of his Sultanate. The British left and in 1963 Zanzibar regained the status of an independent Sultanate.

Within months, Tanganyika's dictator Julius Nyerere organized a coup of original Bantu Africans, supported by his troops, led by Abied Karume, to topple the Arab regime. What followed in January 1964 was a massacre of all Arab and other light-skinned population. Within days 17,000 people were killed and the coastline was littered with corpses of Arabs trying to flee. Karume declared Zanzibar as a republic and barely three months later, in April 1964, signed an Act of Union with Nyerere and nominally Tanganyika and Zanzibar became a Confederation, with the latter having its own president, cabinet (still called Revolutionary Council, the name which Karume has used to legitimize his cabinet of war criminals), and a 50-member parliament. The president of Zanzibar is also the second vice president of Tanzania. Karume held the dual posts for the initial years before he was assassinated in 1972.

During the presidency of Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Zanzibar tried to assert its nominal independence and became the member of the Jeddah-based 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1991. There was political uproar in the mainland over this exercise of autonomy and ultimately Zanzibar had to withdraw its membership, something that the OIC would not recognize for some years.

Zanzibar remained under brutal totalitarianism till 1995, when under international pressure multi-party system, was introduced. Press freedom remained throttled, elections rigged, and political opponents routinely tortured, according to Amnesty

International. The African minority retained its hold through fraudulent elections in 1995, 2000, and lately in 2005.

The non-black or mixed-blood part of the population, including descendants of the deposed Arabs, supports Civic United Front (CUF) of Seif Sharif Hamad, who has lost all the three presidential elections that have been declared unfair by international observers. The tragic part of the elections is that each time the CUF supporters came out on the street in protest but the government suppressed them most ruthlessly. In January 2001, it was more of a police massacre of CUF supporters rather than a mere use of excessive force against them. Hundreds of CUF supporters ran for their lives and live as refugees in Kenya and elsewhere. This was a unique exercise of ethnic cleansing of political opponents. Later next year, a truce was signed between CCM and CUF whereby the former pledged no further vendetta against the CUF.

The elections last month were thus held in a spirit of high optimism, mainly because of the international wave in favour of democracy, but also due to the enthusiasm generated by the Orange revolution in Ukraine and by the fact that even hardliner CCM supporters had been put off by the government's failure in improving the lives of the people where most of the population lives well below the poverty line.

After a hotly contested election, there were clear signs that the elections had been won by the CUF. Hundreds of CUF supporters assembled at the party headquarters in the smaller island of Pemba as soon as the voting ended and began to celebrate the imminent victory. The youngsters were waving the party flags and dancing. Then started the orgy of blood.

The ruling party candidate and incumbent president of Zanzibar, Amani Karume, the eldest son and political heir of Karume the elder, the erstwhile butcher of Zanzibar, did not have the patience of announcing election results in his favour before ordering his forces to attack the unarmed and unsuspecting crowds.

For many days, the clashes continued in which the security forces wrote new chapters in the definition book of barbarism. For the hopefuls of Orange revolution, it was not as much orange as it was red. Nine of the protestors were killed by beating of sticks, not by gunshot wounds. Imagine the brutality! I am not making a case for them having been killed by direct gunfire, I am arguing for their right of life. Zanzibar declared a narrow victory of 32,000 votes for the incumbent Karume for the presidential contest and 30 seats for his CCM against 19 for CUF in the Zanzibar parliament. The tally of the two parties is 206 to 19 in the mainland's parliament. The truth is that the electoral exercise in Zanzibar was far more egregious than that which triggered the Orange revolution in Ukraine.

Saad S Khan is a Cambridge-based scholar and a widely read analyst on politics, governance and human rights in the Muslim world.