Death threats in Zimbabwe

That Hilda Mafudze still manages a beaming smile and a hearty laugh is something of a miracle. A Zimbabwean opposition MP, she has fled her rural home after death threats. Her car has been destroyed, a colleague beheaded, and another beaten to death outside the primary school where he worked.

In her view - one shared by many Zimbabweans, foreign observers and locally based diplomats - fears that Robert Mugabe will reject the results of next month's presidential elections in Zimbabwe if he loses to Morgan Tsvangirai have been overtaken. There is now a widespread belief that Zimbabwe has already been subjected to what amounts to a dictatorship. An illegal and military takeover has in effect already taken place.

Ms Mafudze, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change MP for the Mhondoro constituency, said: "All that remains is to have the election - and make the coup official.

"I cannot go to my constituency because I have had so many death threats, and there have been so many attempts to kill me. The army has said it will not obey anyone but Mugabe. He has his militia all over the country, he controls all the state media and his secret police detain all opponents of the regime. That adds up to a coup by anybody's definition."

The threats are genuine. Ms Mafudze's friend and colleague Tutus Nheya, from Mr Tsvangirai's MDC party, was decapitated recently while campaigning in the constituency next to her own. The area happens to be represented by Mugabe's sister, Sabina.

On Tuesday she attempted to visit the family of a local teacher, another MDC activist, who had been beaten to death last week.

She was smuggled into the area by two South African election monitors in a clearly marked observer's car. But the militia from the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union was hunting her.

She said: "I was warned not to go near the funeral, and so we tried to leave." As she approached a militia checkpoint in the observers' car, logs were thrown across the remote dirt road to block their path.

Young men, armed with clubs and rocks, approached the vehicle. Ms Mafudze lay on the floor beneath the back seats and the observers frantically covered her with old newspapers.

She said: "I held my breath and the observers were very brave. We got through. But if they had found me, they would have dragged me out of my car and killed me."

The mother of four - two boys aged 20 and 16, and two girls aged 11 and 4 - is high on the list of Mugabe's political enemies. She, like him, is a Shona who was born close to his home area around Chinoyi. She is also the only opposition MP to have managed to win a seat in rural Mashonaland West, where Zanu otherwise reigns supreme.

She said: "I was attacked three times last week. Every day my oldest son, Timothy, calls me from America where he is studying and says 'Give it up, mum, they're going to kill you'. To be honest, I am terrified when I go into Mhondoro but that is the same for all of us. I mostly fear for my youngest children."

Last Saturday, Ms Mafudze's car was smashed up while she sat inside.

She said: "This election has taken a heavy toll on my family. My daughters don't know much about what is going on and I don't tell them. But my younger son watched everything I do and begs me to stop it."

Mugabe has deployed thousands of armytrained militia in more than 140 bases across the country. By day they hang around shopping centres, loafing and looking for suspected members of the opposition to beat up, or worse. At night they return to their bases, where they are among the few Zimbabweans to get more than one meal a day.

A European diplomat said: "There is a case to argue that the law has been suspended and the armed forces subverted to the programmeof one of the candidates. That certainlylooks like a coup. It would smell like a coup if Mugabe actually insists on staying on if he loses at the polls. That is the milliondollar question to which none of us know the answer."

As a result, Mr Tsvangirai's campaign has been driven underground across much of the country by the militia, and by government edict. This week the police cancelled his rallies in Harare and Bulawayo, where opinion polls show he enjoys overwhelming support.

He has been charged with high treason, based on a spurious tape in which he allegedly plotted Mugabe's assassination. The tape was put together by Mugabe's own Canadian public relations company.

He was charged this week with holding an illegal gathering, when he went for a routine internal party meeting in Harare. As a result of this sort of pressure, his supporters have resorted to the "bush telegraph".

Barred from campaigning on the ground, Ms Mafudze has organised female activists to spread the "Vote Tsvangirai" message by word where they gather to gossip anyway - "at water holes, and by the river side where they do their washing, and when they are working in the fields".

Foreign diplomats have been dismayed by the increasing level of violence and the carte blanche that Zanu's militia has been given to try to prevent MDC supporters from making it to the polls on 9 and 10 March.

Some said they agreed that a "coup" had already been carried out and suggested that Mugabe was "simply going through the motions of an election on the off chance that he could win it".

Ms Mafudze laughed at the suggestion, saying: "Mugabe says that we're a white-dominated party because we get a lot of funding from the whites. But whites cannot tell us we are hungry - our stomachs tell us that - we're hungry for food and hungry for change, and that's what Mugabe's afraid of."

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