Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will respect the will of voters if they end his 28-year rule in a run-off election against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, the state-run Herald newspaper reported today.
Mr Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the March 29th presidential poll but failed to win an absolute majority. His Movement for Democractic Change (MDC), which has accused the government of cheating in past elections, fears it will rig the results of the June 27th run-off.
"If the president loses, he will be the first one to go on national television to acknowledge the result to the people," Emmerson Mnangagwa, a government minister and Mugabe's chief election agent, told the Herald.
But he added that Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party were confident they would win the second round of voting.
The 84-year-old Zimbabwean ruler kicked off his re-election campaign on Sunday, accusing the United States of political interference in Zimbabwe's affairs and the MDC of training youths to engage in political violence.
He threatened to kick out U.S. ambassador James McGee and said the US State Department's top Africa envoy had behaved like a prostitute for suggesting Tsvangirai won the first round.
The MDC won control of parliament in a parallel election.
Mr Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, accuses the US and Britain of backing the MDC to punish him for seizing thousands of white-owned farms since 2000.
He also says Western sabotage is to blame for Zimbabwe's economic meltdown, shown in 165,000 per cent inflation, unemployment of 80 per cent and chronic food and fuel shortages.