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LONDON - What is happening in Zimbabwe today is not a preparation for elections, but a violent campaign that could degenerate into civil war, Zimbabwe Professor Eliphas Mukonoweshuro told a meeting at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London on Monday night.

"What the international community has witnessed is the gradual introduction of a civil-military junta. We are now actually in the concluding phase of what was virtually a slow motion coup d’etat … a coup d’etat against democratic governance and democratic values," said Mukonoweshuro.

The professor, accompanied by Mark Chavunduka, editor of the independent Zimbabwe Standard, are on a trip to Brussels, London and Washington organised by the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust in a last-minute bid to try to persuade the international community that it is still not too late to force Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to permit at least a degree of freedom and fairness in the March presidential elections.

Both speakers, with at times heated interjections from Zimbabwe’s top envoy in Britain, High Commissioner Simbarashe S. Mumbengegwi, declared that a free and fair poll in the March 9-10 presidential election is now impossible.

But they urged the immediate deployment of observers from the SADC nations, the European Union, the United States and other countries as at least a means of putting a break on the escalating violence.

Earlier, European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed to impose targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe – including a travel ban and freezing of the assets of Mugabe and his top lieutenants – unless the Zimbabwe leader ensures the deployment of EU observers within a week.

The Zimbabwe government, in what critics see as another delaying tactic, said it would admit observers, but none from Britain.

Mukonoweshuro, an academic at the University of Zimbabwe and an expert on electoral fraud tactics, said that Mugabe’s regime has reacted to the real threat of losing power to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change with repressive legislation and a "violent survival strategy."

It is coordinated by a National Command Centre based at the Zanu PF headquarters in Harare, consisting of top governing party officials, members of the Central Intelligence Organisation, the police, paramilitary organisations, self-styled war veterans and paramilitaries, the professor said.

Some 2,000 unemployed youths, their training period cut from 90 days to 10 days, are being unleashed to into all 120 parliamentary constituencies – operating "virtually as freebooters, sustaining themselves by violence and theft."

Chavunduka, tortured by the Zimbabwe government in 1999, said observers and foreign journalists should have been in the country at least a month ago, and Mugabe planned more delaying tactics to hold up foreign scrutiny of the poll, he added.

The High Commissioner maintained that observers and foreign journalist would be allowed in, and charged that the professor and the editor were simply opposition politicians, and that the MDC was a violent party.

The professor, warning of low level civil war, replied that in some urban areas, people now wearied of violence, economic hardship and lack of police protection, were organising resistance. "That is natural … if that is violence, the right to life itself is a violent measure," he said.