ALL across Harare yesterday, men, women, and children separated from their parents, including a boy of 12 with suspected malaria and a fragile 15-year-old girl, were hiding from a state-run terror campaign unleashed against Zimbabwe’s opposition.

Beaten and driven from their homes in the countryside and crowded townships in the reprisals that have followed President Robert Mugabe’s apparent electoral defeat three weeks ago, they made their way to the city by any means possible.

They came in their dozens, by bus, by train, by communal taxi. Such was one frightened man’s determination to escape that he walked for many miles with bare feet. Even those who did not need hospital care were still in pain days after their arrival from beaten, swollen limbs.

The anonymity of the big city was protecting them. In the provinces, doctors and nurses had been warned by militants not to treat “political cases”. Those who fled were under no illusion.

Indeed, they had been warned by the tormentors who had burnt many of them out of their homes that, if they returned, they would be killed. There was at least one death during the week.

They were from every walk of life: carpenters, tractor drivers and teachers, bottle store owners, gardeners and dozens and dozens of unemployed, a reflection of the plight of people in a country suffering 80% unemployment and 200,000% inflation.

“Is this the way we should be marking our 28th year of independence?” asked Jonathan Chanakira, a trader, in hospital with fractured arms. “It makes me weep.”

He was speaking as Mugabe marked Zimbabwe’s independence day on Friday with a bitter speech accusing Britain of bank-rolling the opposition as a means of dominating its former colony. “We are being bought like livestock,” Mugabe said.

Chanakira was not listening to the 84-year-old president, who has ruled since independence in 1980. “We are not free at all,” he said from his hospital bed. “It is high time Zimbabwe was liberated from the liberators.”

Like the majority of those who fled to Harare, he had been punished for supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). His attackers were uniformed soldiers who dragged him from a shop, shoved him to the ground and beat him almost senseless.

It was their reaction to the opposition’s call for a general strike last Tuesday to force the release of the presidential election results. His suburb had voted heavily for the MDC.

For 28 years Zimbabweans have voted in election after election for Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party.

They were driven by a mixture of loyalty for the party’s role in the independence struggle and fear of retribution if they voted otherwise.

Even as the wheels came off the economy in recent years, many continued supporting Mugabe, especially in backward rural areas where they could be easily persuaded.

However, on March 29 Zimbabweans, including many disenchanted rural dwellers, found their courage and voted overwhelmingly for the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai, its leader.

Zanu-PF lost control of parliament and Tsvangirai claimed victory in the presidential vote with more than 50%. The government has refused to release the final results and a partial recount of both votes was scheduled yesterday, a process the opposition believes is designed to keep Mugabe in power.

It is a critical time. Some 100 MDC councillors, militants and party officials, mostly in Harare, have been arrested. Much of the hierarchy has been driven underground.

“What is happening is shattering,” said Iain Kay, the first white farmer to be beaten up in Zimbabwe in 2000 when the farm seizures began, who has just been elected an opposition MP in the constituency of Marondera Central, east of the capital.

“It disempowers you and leaves you struggling for words. We have been taken back to a dark place when we thought we had finally come out of it.” Another said that so many officials were hiding or in jail that it had “emasculated” the party.

Most of the violence is concentrated in former strongholds of Zanu-PF that voted MDC. In one constituency in the province of Mashonaland East, the campaign manager for an opposition MP became the first target. A tall man in his forties, he was told by informants that Zanu-PF activists had called a meeting to discuss his fate and some wanted to murder him.

They nearly succeeded. Last weekend, he said, more than 300 Zanu-PF youths came to his house. He escaped by firing warning shots in the air from the rifle he kept to protect his livestock from wild animals.

Later he returned to find his mother severely beaten and his house ransacked. Half his pigs were slaughtered, his kitchen was destroyed, his pickup truck burnt and his money stolen.

He was seized and locked in the house. The mob was preparing to set it alight, but at the last moment one of them relented. “No,” he said. “Let’s not kill him. Let’s take him away and show him what we can do.”

The campaign manager was held prisoner in a militants’ camp deep in the bush. “I was interrogated about the MDC. They wanted to know where the opposition party got its money from,” he said.

“One of them said, ‘Let’s attach some rocks to his genitals’, but the leader said it was not a good idea.”

The questioning went on for three days until the police, alerted by his sister, freed him. Perversely, he was immediately arrested for firing his rifle, and was charged with committing an act of public violence.

While in custody, he was told by an airforce commander, one of the senior military officers dispatched to the provinces to oversee the violent intimidation: “When you get out, I am going to strangle you and you will never live here again.”

Freed after paying a fine and receiving a suspended prison sentence, he ran away to Harare.

A woman aged 35 from a village near the town of Mutoko, a former Zanu-PF stronghold 90 miles north of Harare, said militants had assembled the villagers and harangued them for voting MDC. As frightened villagers looked on, the woman, an MDC organiser, was dragged to the ground and a youth kicked her until blood poured from her nose. Others stood on her neck and buttocks.

Ignoring her cries, they beat her with sticks until after 15 minutes she was unconscious.

However, despite the crack-down to intimidate MDC supporters and ensure that Mugabe wins any presidential election run-off against Tsvangirai, evidence began to emerge last week that some pillars of the regime are no longer regarded by it as loyal.

Police in some townships have been withdrawn and replaced by soldiers or militants in army uniforms, who have been giving the beatings. In the most violent areas, the police seem to have been sidelined as Zanu-PF militants and so-called war veterans take charge. When victims reported attacks to police stations, officers were turning them away, saying there was nothing they could do; it was “political”.

Disenchantment seems to have seeped even into the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). A man called Alfred volunteered over a drink in a Harare bar last week that his wife worked for the CIO but she was “Mugabe’s worst enemy”.

“We had to sell our car to send our son to university in South Africa,” he said. “We both hate him [Mugabe]. Everyone in Harare hates him. They refer to him as Mudhara [Old Man].”

Old man he may be, and such remarks may not be representative of an organisation that is a mainstay of the regime, but Mugabe does not look like a man under pressure.

“Mugabe’s generals have told him, ‘We will win the election for you,’ and he has taken their advice,” said a Zanu-PF insider. “He is properly engaged and will fight it out to the bitter end.”

Video: Riot police in action on the streets of Harare

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