The attack was nine days ago, but the axe wound on Martin Mandava's head is still raw and the flesh of his buttocks has been turned to pulp by whips. He rested gingerly on a blanket yesterday morning in a rank, overstuffed office in the headquarters of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change, surrounded by 300 people just like him - bloodied and bandaged and scared, with nowhere to go but here, a political headquarters turned fetid refugee camp.
Nine days ago, a gang of youths who support Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party broke through Mr. Mandava's front door and dragged him, his heavily pregnant wife and their five-year-old son out into the yard.
"They said my wife and kid should stand there and watch while they show them what they do to MDC fathers," Mr. Mandava, a 29-year-old farmer, recounted softly to a Globe and Mail contributor in Harare. Mr. Mandava is from Mutoko in the west, a rural constituency where people have in the past always supported ZANU-PF, but voted overwhelmingly for the MDC in a national election held nearly a month ago.
The youths, members of a ZANU-PF militia, began to hurl stones at Mr. Mandava, to hit him with sticks and to swing at him with an axe. When his wife screamed, one of the youths threatened to drive a knife into her belly.
"The gang leader ... pulled out his knife and asked his gang members what he should do to a traitor like me. One of them said, 'Cut the genitals, because that's the only way to ensure that there won't be any MDC babies in their area,' " Mr. Mandava recalled. The gang leader yanked down his trousers and grabbed his genitals, he said, while his wife screamed and clamped her hands over their son's eyes so he would not see what happened next.
"Then he spat into my face and said he would spare me if I sang one liberation war chorus. I sang while he held my genitals. He let go of me, put his boot on my neck and he lit his cigarette. He smoked the whole cigarette whilst his boot was pressed against my neck. I was bleeding all over from the ax wound on my head."
The beating went on for four hours; when they were done, the youths dumped him on his doorstep, and told his wife not to try to get help or they'd kill her. "They also bragged that this is what they had done to other traitors in the area, so no one was going to help me." Leaving, the youths burned down his house.
Neighbours took Mr. Mandava to a local clinic, and the next day he was transferred to a hospital in the capital. He has since been discharged. He can't go home, he said. "They will kill me." And so he has joined 300 other opposition supporters taking shelter in two big rooms in the MDC headquarters in Harare.
"We are facing a serious crisis," said Thokozani Khupe, the MDC's vice-president, as she surveyed the refugees and their small heaps of salvaged possessions. They last had a meal the day before, when a benefactor dropped off food supplies, she said. "There is no water in the building. ... The party does not have the resources to feed 200 people [and]the number of people is increasing every day. I don't know what we will do now."
Ms. Khupe is left to make that decision largely on her own because the senior leadership of the MDC is all outside Zimbabwe. Presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai is reported to be in West Africa, lobbying leaders for support. He told The Globe and Mail last week that he was sure he would face arrest and possible attack when he returns home. MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti addressed a crowd of MDC supporters last night, but in Johannesburg, in neighbouring South Africa.
Nearly four weeks after the election, Zimbabwe's government-controlled electoral commission has yet to release results from the presidential ballot. It is in the process of recounting the parliamentary votes from 23 constituencies where it alleges opposition cheating. ZANU-PF lost control of parliament in the election, but could easily retake a majority if the original results in even half of those 23 constituencies are overturned.
Mr. Tsvangirai is widely believed to have won the presidential election, but ZANU-PF insists he did not obtain an outright majority and that a runoff is required. Militias such as the one that attacked Mr. Mandava have been deployed across the country.
Now the victims of that campaign are making their way to Harare, saying they have nowhere else to go but the MDC headquarters in Harvest House, where a banner with an avuncular photo of Mr. Tsvangirai ("Morgan has More!") flutters from the first-floor windows.
The stories the refugees tell are chilling. Takawira Mandere, a 34-year-old farmer from Gokwe, 300 kilometres southwest of Harare, was shot once in each leg on April 12 by a ZANU-PF-affiliated shop owner. "He said the only way to get order in the area was to kill at least one MDC member so that the sellouts in the opposition know that ZANU-PF means business," Mr. Mandere said yesterday.
On April 19, Moreblessing Chigadza, 35, was working in her fields in Murewha, 100 kilometres outside Harare, with her three-month-old baby on her back, when she saw thick smoke rising from her home. She rushed there to find it on fire, with a gang of five youths watching it burn and three others in the process of shoving her struggling husband, a local MDC organizer, into a white pickup truck without licence plates.
One of the five young men who stayed behind turned to her and told her to take the baby off her back: "He said they wanted to deal with me alone because my child was innocent." She set her child down, and the men began to beat her. "I had heard that they used sticks and did not imagine that they could use a motorbike chain to beat another human being. But that is what they used on me."
When she tried to run, one of the youths tripped her and she fell and broke her leg. Eventually the youths moved off, and neighbours took her to the hospital. Now she is at Harvest House with the baby, one of 40 children among the refugees, but she has had no word of her husband.
"Once you escape that hell you will never want to go back," she said. "There is no way I am going back."
With a report from a Globe and Mail contributor in Harare