Robert Mugabe: A Despot's Cruel Resolve

Robert Mugabe's regime likes to talk about breaking the back of Zimbabwe's opposition. John Moyo's story suggests that some of his followers take that charge literally. Moyo (not his real name) is an activist for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Bhegedhe, a village of mud huts and mopani trees in eastern Zimbabwe's Buhera district. Moyo, 45, was walking home from a friend's house one Saturday evening in May, he says, when "I was struck in the back by a heavy object and fell down. I woke up two days later at Birchenough Bridge hospital." Moyo's wife Tendai, 37, had found him bleeding and unconscious in the road and taken him to hospital on an oxcart. Both his legs and his back were broken, and his spinal cord was partly severed; he is now paralyzed below the waist. Local observers have little doubt that pro-government militias are to blame. "Moyo is a well-known MDC activist, a strong organizer, very popular," says a neighbor, Simon. "They knew that crippling him would also cripple MDC."

Such stories have become common in the run-up to the second round of Zimbabwe's election on June 27. The vote is deemed necessary because even though MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai came out ahead in the presidential poll on March 29, according to official results, he didn't get an outright majority. Earlier hopes that the vote might end Mugabe's 28-year rule quickly evaporated. Instead, the first-round results turned out to be a cue for Zimbabwe's security services and pro-Mugabe militias to rampage across the country.

The MDC leadership is a target. Tsvangirai is arrested on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, and on June 12 MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti was detained at Harare airport and charged with treason. But it is lower-ranking activists and ordinary Zimbabweans who have borne the brunt. The MDC claims 25,000 people have fled the violence, thousands of its supporters have been beaten, hundreds hospitalized, and 66 killed, while 200 more are missing. (Reporting restrictions mean the figures cannot be verified.) A doctor who examined the bodies of two dead MDC activists tells TIME their tongues had been mutilated. In Bhegedhe, villagers talk of being rounded up by the militias for all-night indoctrinations. "They tell us that if we vote for Tsvangirai, we will have voted for war," says one.

In a report this month, the New York–based organization Human Rights Watch details how the Joint Operations Command, combining the heads of all Zimbabwe's armed forces, unleashed the violence under the name Operation Makavhoterapapi, or "Where did you put your vote?" Tiseke Kasambala, the organization's Zimbabwe researcher, told TIME that Mugabe is still a powerful force, even though he is now letting the generals call the shots. The MDC goes further, saying the top generals of the Joint Operations Command are now in charge of Zimbabwe, having staged a silent coup shortly after the March elections. In a telephone interview from inside Zimbabwe, Tsvangirai, 56, a former trade union leader, compared the militias to the janjaweed in Darfur and described the government as a junta. Indeed, under Mugabe's regime, the country is fast becoming Africa's Burma: an isolated military cabal bent on crushing democracy, paranoid about imagined foreign conspiracies and prepared to sacrifice its people to preserve its power.

Few have escaped the dragnet. On June 5, militias surrounded a car carrying U.S. diplomats and threatened to kill them. The regime has also arrested and beaten journalists, local and foreign. On June 18, the government eased an earlier ban on foreign aid groups, whom it accused of supporting the MDC, allowing food and HIV/AIDS groups to re-enter the country. But the same day it expelled an official from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

The regime is not shy about its embrace of violence. The MDC, say Zimbabwe's rulers, is an instrument of a Western plot to restore the white rule it overthrew at independence in 1980. On June 13, Mugabe was quoted by the Herald as saying that Zimbabwe's voters had made a "mistake" by giving Tsvangirai a majority, one that "can cause a lot of suffering for the people if we go back to war." The militias had asked him if they could do just that, he added. "They said this country was won by the barrel of the gun and should we let it go at the stroke of a pen? Should one just write an X and then the country goes just like that?" This indivisibility of the interests of party and country has become a common regime refrain. On May 29, army Chief of Staff Martin Chedondo was quoted in the Herald telling his men their job was to defend ZANU-PF. "If you have other thoughts, then you should remove that uniform," he reportedly said.

The generals' motives seem to be not so much avoiding justice as accumulating wealth. At first glance, it's hard to see how anyone could profit from a country where unemployment is at 80% and inflation is 165,000%. But the regime works the chaos to its advantage. The seizure of white-owned farms since 2000, endorsed by Mugabe as a long-overdue redistribution of land to Zimbabwe's black majority, has benefited the ZANU-PF élite. A senior army officer warns that the generals will use any means necessary to hold onto their riches. Should the June 27 vote go against them, he says, they will disregard it: "There will be a coup if Tsvangirai wins. Mugabe is going nowhere."

Such attitudes have alienated old Mugabe supporters in Africa. On June 11, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni criticized the Zimbabwe elections and said Mugabe "must go" if he lost the vote. Two days later 40 African leaders, including 14 former presidents, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu published an open letter condemning the violence, while Botswana, one of several of Zimbabwe's neighbors now caring for the heavy influx of refugees who have fled the violence and poverty, lodged an official protest with the regime over its conduct. On a visit to Zimbabwe, Marwick Khumalo, the head of an African parliamentarians' observer mission, said he had received "horrendous stories" of cruelty related to the elections. "Violence is at the top of the agenda of this electoral process," said Khumalo in Harare, adding he would not be able to endorse the process if it continued.

That mood may be catching on in the ranks of the security services. "Most of [the commanders'] sentiments are not shared by the rank and file," says one junior army officer. "Our salaries are low, and most of us live in the same areas as the suffering masses. They want us to beat and kill our relatives? That's not possible."

Some ordinary Zimbabweans are no less defiant. In Warren Park, a western suburb of Harare, Mugabe's election posters have been defaced with messages such as MUGABE IMBAVHA (Mugabe is a thief) and HAULUME BOB (You won't get anything, Bob). Moyo remains determined. "I'm going to ask my wife and son to carry me to the polling station on June 27," he tells TIME. "I believe Zimbabwe will be free one day. I will exercise my right and continue to support the party of my choice." Zimbabwe's rulers may be dispensing with the pretense of democracy, but its people haven't given up on it yet.