A Flawed but Enduring Leader Returns to Zimbabwe

MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, the chief rival of Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, drove up to a Harare police station last year to check on dozens of his supporters inside on their bellies, being kicked, clobbered and stomped.

The policemen quickly stopped and grabbed the moon-faced opposition leader. Witnesses said the station reverberated with the sickening thwack of blows to his buttocks, back and head. “They were fighting with each other to beat him,” said Tendai Biti, his deputy in the opposition party.

Mr. Tsvangirai, whose thrashing made him an international symbol of resistance to Mr. Mugabe’s repressive rule, returned to Zimbabwe on Saturday for a showdown with his nemesis in a June 27 runoff after six weeks of self-imposed exile. He bested Mr. Mugabe in a March 29 election, then fled the country in the middle of the night on April 8 after his staff said it got word of a plot to kill him.

Mr. Tsvangirai is a flawed leader who has sometimes been naïve and too conciliatory, according to critics and allies alike. And yet, many of them say, he has endured.

Over the years, both sides say, he has credulously fallen into traps laid by Mr. Mugabe, too often avoided aggressively confronting the country’s strongman and lacked the finesse to heal a bitter rift in his own party before the March election.

In recent weeks, he has come under increasing criticism for staying out of the country while his supporters have been attacked, tortured and even killed in a sweeping state-sponsored campaign to intimidate all who dare challenge Mr. Mugabe’s re-election. William McGee, the American ambassador in Harare, said there was evidence that an assassination plot was threatened, but he said he believed that it was disinformation meant to keep Mr. Tsvangirai from returning home.

Still, Mr. Tsvangirai’s allies and many of his detractors credit him with withstanding excruciating physical and psychic pressure from ZANU-PF, the governing party, and persisting stoically over years of arrests, beatings, assassination attempts, a treason trial, fraud-ridden elections and his own tactical blunders.

In the election itself, he vanquished a breakaway faction of his own party and an independent candidate, earning his own scarred claim to leadership.

“He’s been imprisoned, humiliated and accused of being a puppet of the West,” said George Bizos, a South African lawyer who represented Nelson Mandela in the apartheid era and was Mr. Tsvangirai’s advocate during his treason trial in 2004. “But I believe he is a Zimbabwean patriot in touch with the vast majority of his people. He has shown he has stamina.”

The son of a bricklayer and the eldest of nine children, Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, never went to college and labored in the nickel mines before rising through the ranks of the union movement. He faces a very different opponent in Mr. Mugabe, 84, a university-educated teacher who became the hero of his country’s liberation from white rule and its first and only president since independence in 1980.

Mr. Mugabe contemptuously mocks Mr. Tsvangirai for not having joined the guerrilla struggle in his youth, and the state-owned newspaper — a mouthpiece for the governing party — recently belittled him as a coward and Western stooge with “a big black nose” and “chubby and pimply cheeks.”

BUT Mr. Tsvangirai (pronounced CHANG-guh-rye) can rightfully claim to be the first politician to win more votes than Mr. Mugabe at the polls — and have it officially recognized. On Thursday, he toured refugee camps here in southern Africa’s economic capital where his countrymen — some of the millions who have fled their nation’s imploding economy — have been subjected to xenophobic attacks in impoverished townships.

“We have to finish off this work, and the only way to finish is for us to go back and vote the man out,” Mr. Tsvangirai told a cheering crowd through a bullhorn, encouraging listeners to go home and exercise their franchise.

Mr. Tsvangirai was born into what he called “a very humble peasant family” that survived on his father’s earnings as a bricklayer and what they grew on their small farm. He quit school before college and went to work in a textile factory and later in the mines to help pay school fees for his eight siblings. As young men were joining the armed resistance in the 1970s, Mr. Tsvangirai stayed on the job “to look after that brood of Tsvangirai kids,” he said.

He rose through the ranks of the mine workers union and in 1988 became secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Stephen Chan, a professor of international relations at the University of London, describes in his book, “Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai” (Fingerprint Cooperative, 2005), how Mr. Tsvangirai, a pragmatic social democrat, turned the congress into voice for workers at a time when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were pushing “structural adjustment programs” that required African governments to keep a lid on spending, including wages.

Mr. Tsvangirai’s record, Mr. Chan wrote, was “nothing short of remarkable.