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 The opposition, which has claimed victory in the race, continued to press for long-delayed results from the March 29 elections. A judge was expected to rule Monday on an urgent petition aimed at forcing the election commission to release the vote tally.
Nine days after the election, the commission has yet to announce the results. Unofficial tallies by independent monitors show Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe
-- but fewer than the 50 percent plus one vote required to avoid a runoff.
Tsvangirai accuses Mugabe of plotting a campaign of violence to bolster his chances of winning an expected runoff. He expressed concerns the state would mobilize the armed forces, youth brigades and war veterans to terrorize voters into supporting Mugabe.
Over the weekend, he said Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party was "preparing a war against the people."
Mugabe has been accused of winning previous elections through violence and intimidation. Scores of opponents were killed during the 2002 and 2005 campaigns.
"This our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites," Mugabe told mourners at a family funeral on Sunday referring to whites by the pejorative term "mabhunu" in the local Shona language, The Herald newspaper reported. "We don't want to hear this fight is going backward."
Militant supporters of the ruling party invaded eight of the few remaining white-owned commercial farms on Sunday, driving at least four cattle ranchers off their land and seizing equipment and livestock, the farmers reported, in another sign Mugabe plans to use violence to stay in power.
Police persuaded the invaders to leave farms in southern Masvingo province, but only one of the farmers returned, the farmers said.
Mugabe started the often-violence seizure of white-owned farms in 2000, after he suffered his first defeat at the polls over a referendum to entrench his presidential powers. He said the farms would go to poor blacks. In reality, many of the 5,000 seized farms went to a his friends and cronies.
The seizures touched off an economic collapse in the country that used to thrive on exports of food, minerals and tobacco.
Today, a third of the population depends on imported food handouts. Another third has fled the country as economic and political refugees, and 80 percent is jobless. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 years to 35.
A leader of independence war fighters in Masvingo, Isiah Muzenda, warned that veterans and "patriotic Zimbabweans" will take "strong action against unrepentant white farmers" allegedly preparing the repossess their farms, The Herald reported.
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 Mugabe's ruling party has demanded a recount of the votes, and a further delay in the release of results, during which, the opposition claims, they are tampering with ballots.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has said it would not accept a recount, did not want a runoff and pressed ahead with legal attempts to force the publication of the results.
Tsvangirai called for strong international pressure to persuade Mugabe to accept defeat, in an opinion piece published Monday in the British newspaper The Guardian.
He urged the International Monetary Fund to withhold a billion dollars in aid from Zimbabwe until Mugabe agrees to step down. And he called for South Africa, the United States and Britain to increase pressure on Mugabe.
"Our country is on a razor's edge," he wrote. Tsvangirai was in South Africa for meetings, his party said, apparently to press demands for international pressure to persuade Zimbabwe's ruler of 28 years to step down.
The law requires a runoff within 21 days of the initial election, but diplomats in Harare and at the United Nations say Mugabe may order a 90-day delay to give security forces time to clamp down.
Government officials have dismissed fears of violence, calling such claims nonsense.
Official results for parliamentary elections held alongside the presidential race showed Mugabe's ZANU-PF losing its majority in the 210-seat parliament for the first time in the country's history.
The government banned most foreign journalists from covering the elections and barred Western election observers. Several foreign journalists, including Barry Bearak of the New York Times, remained in custody Monday after being charged with "illegally observing an election without official accreditation," according to their lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa. She said the offense carried a maximum penalty of a fine and/or two years in prison.
[Associated
Press; By ANGUS SHAW]
Copyright 2008 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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