2:33pm UK, Friday May 16, 2008

Emma Hurd, Africa correspondent

Zimbabweans will return to the polls on June 27 to vote in a crucial run-off election which will determine whether Robert Mugabe maintains his 28 year grip on power.

The pair are fighting for control

The date was announced by Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission as Mr Mugabe admitted for the first time that the first round of voting on March 29th had been a disaster for his ruling party.

"Although the presidential result did not yield an outright winner, it was indeed disastrous," he told a meeting of Zanu PF in Harare.

But he said the party would not lose power to an opposition backed by "a hostile axis of powerful governments".

The official results showed that Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, defeated the 84 year old liberation leader, but not by a big enough margin to avoid a run-off.

Mr Tsvangirai, who has been travelling outside Zimbabwe since the first round, plans to return home within days to start campaigning.

"We will participate in the run-off but ... violence has to cease for an election to be conducted or that election will not be legitimate," he told reporters at a news conference in Belfast.

The MDC says 40 of its activists have been killed in the past six weeks and hundreds more have been beaten and tortured.

Survivors of the attacks, crowded into clinics across the country with broken limbs and deep flesh wounds, say they were told they were "being punished" for voting for the opposition.

The MDC claims the ruling Zanu PF is orchestrating the campaign of violence to try to keep Mr Mugabe in power. The president's party denies the charge and accuses the MDC of causing the violence to discredit the government.

The run-off is due to be monitored by observers from SADC, the regional grouping of southern African nations, and Mr Tsvangirai urged the organisation to hold an urgent meeting to avoid "rivers of dead people".

Zimbabwe has been crippled under Mr Mugabe's rule, with inflation topping 165,000 per cent and 80 per cent of the workforce unemployed.

The 84-year-old liberation leader blames foreign sanctions for the crisis and accuses the opposition of being the puppets of "western imperialists".