'Your vote is your bullet'

The soldiers and ruling party militiamen herded the people of Rusape to an open field at the back of the local sports club and made their point crystal clear.

"Your vote is your bullet," a soldier told the terrified crowd. Everyone knew what he meant. "They are saying we will die if we don't vote for Robert Mugabe, that there will be war if we don't vote for Mugabe," said a wary young woman holding a small child.

Darkness was falling and already Mitsubishi pick-up trucks filled with young men carrying sticks, spears and knives were out on the streets preparing to move door to door, beating and killing.

"They hunt the opposition. They said they ate human liver and drank urine during the war and so they were prepared for war again," said the woman.

The militiamen found Farai Gamba, a ward organiser for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), at the weekend and shot him dead. The Rusape chairman of a group of Zimbabwean independent election monitors disappeared on Saturday night.

The de facto curfew is in place because the ruling Zanu-PF does not want witnesses to the terror that engulfs Zimbabwe.

More than 100 opposition MDC activists and supporters have been killed and 200 have disappeared. Thousands more have been beaten so badly they will bear the scars for life. A number of rapes have been reported, including those of three women who had wooden poles thrust into their vaginas.

Occasionally the killers like to display their handiwork. Chokuse Muphango was murdered in Buhera South last week. His killers put his body on the back of a truck and drove it through town announcing: "We have killed the dog."

The strategy to fight back with violence was agreed by Mugabe's security cabinet, the joint operations command, shortly after Zanu-PF lost the first round of elections.