Mugabe's Endgame

Some details, such as timing and description of movements, in the following are altered for the safety of NEWSWEEK's reporter.

The flame trees are in bloom, the weather mild and sunny. In this glorious midwinter, it is easy to be gulled by the benign face of a country under dictatorship. But in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, that illusion fades quickly.

Arriving after dark, we see gangs of young men, glimpsed in flashes, jogging excitedly down the verge of a wide avenue, half-hidden in the trees and the dark. They have signs and clubs; these are the ZANU-PF youths, young government party activists, who lately have been prowling the capital's best neighborhoods, not molesting the well-off residents themselves, but gathering at their gates and demanding that they send out all their servants for "re-education." They're then taken off for the night to some ZANU-PF center, where they're harangued, mostly about the potentially fatal error of voting for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) or for not voting in the one-horse election Robert Mugabe seems intent on going through with. But in the soft evening, it's hard to take this threat too seriously; the moist aroma of night jasmine perfumes the air. It can't be that bad, can it?

My first contact, ominously, is a no-show. I reach him on the phone and his voice is tense; ambulances scream in the background. "I'm very sorry, I can't meet you because we got called away when one of our friends was abducted and we found him shot in the head; he's in the hospital now, but we don't think he's going to make it. Another one we think is dead, but we can't find his body." The victims were party activists; some details I have to disguise for now, for the safety of those concerned. Suddenly, this is all very serious. And even three days after Morgan Tsvangirai announced he wouldn't run in Friday's election, the anti-opposition violence continues.

The tally is, at first glance, by African or even Zimbabwean standards, not all that great: 80 dead, some say over 100. Many more have died in previous Zimbabwe elections. Much more worrisome are another 200-500 cases of missing persons, many of them reportedly abducted by apparent government agents, and who simply disappeared. "I'm most worried about extrajudicial abductions and executions," says Zimbabwean activist Shari Eppel, author of a study of the Matabeleland massacres in the 1980s, when Mugabe's Fifth Brigade is widely believed to have killed 20,000 followers of the rival Joshua Nkomo faction of revolutionaries, cementing his control over the country's black majority. "We haven't seen that since 1985." Some victims just disappear, and it's not clear whether they've fled the country, as 3 million Zimbabweans (a fourth of the population) have in recent years, or whether they're at the bottom of a ditch somewhere.

One victim's fate was known: An activist named Tonderai Ndira, here in Harare, was taken by six men in black suits last May 14, men who were probably agents of the feared Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) and who threw him in the back of a van without saying a word. Four of them sat on him; a postmortem report showed he suffocated to death within minutes of his abduction—the supposition is that his abductors must have gagged him while they sat on him. His body was found with that of two others last month. "It's not just how many they killed," Eppel says. "It's who they killed; the people they're taking out have been absolutely key."