Military behind Mugabe crackdown

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- President Robert Mugabe called his top security officials to a government training center near his home in central Zimbabwe on March 30. He informed the leaders of the state security apparatus that had enforced his rule for 28 years that he had lost the presidential vote held the previous day.

Then Mugabe said he planned to give up power in a nationally televised speech the next day, according to the notes of one participant that were corroborated by two others with direct knowledge of the meeting.

But Zimbabwe's military chief, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, said the choice was not Mugabe's alone to make. According to two firsthand accounts, Chiwenga told Mugabe his military would take control to keep him in office or the president could contest a runoff election in a military-style campaign against his foes.

Mugabe, the only leader this country has known since its break from white rule nearly three decades ago, agreed to remain in the race and rely on the army to ensure his victory.

During an April 8 military planning meeting, according to written notes and the accounts of participants, the plan was given a code name: CIBD, for Coercion. Intimidation. Beating. Displacement.

In the three months between the vote and the June 27 runoff election, ruling-party militias battered the Movement for Democratic Change, bringing its network to the verge of oblivion. By election day, more than 80 opposition supporters were dead, hundreds missing, thousands injured and hundreds of thousands homeless. Morgan Tsvangirai, the party's leader, dropped out of the race and took refuge in the Dutch Embassy.

The Washington Post was given access to the written record by a participant of several private meetings attended by Mugabe. The notes were corroborated by witnesses, and many of the people interviewed, including members of Mugabe's inner circle, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Much of the reporting was conducted by a Zimbabwean reporter for The Post whose name is being withheld for security reasons.

Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, took power in 1980. The notes and interviews make clear its military supporters, who would lose wealth and influence if Mugabe bowed out, were not ready to give up.

At first, the beatings, torture and other forms of intimidation appeared consistent with the country's past violence. That changed May 5 in the village of Chaona, 65 miles north of the capital, Harare. The village had backed Tsvangirai in the election's first round.

On May 5 -- three days after Mugabe released the official election results -- 200 Mugabe supporters rampaged through its streets. By the time the militia finished, seven people were dead and the injured bore the hallmarks of a new kind of political violence.

Women were stripped and beaten so viciously whole sections of flesh fell away from their buttocks. Men's genitals became targets. The official postmortem report on Chaona opposition activist Aleck Chiriseri listed crushed genitals among the causes of death. Other men died the same way.

Some in the crowds believed soldiers trained in torture were behind the killings, not the more improvisational ruling-party youth or liberation war veterans who traditionally served as Mugabe's enforcers.

"This is what alerted me that now we are dealing with professional killers," said Shepherd Mushonga, a top opposition leader for Mashonaland Central province, which includes Chaona.

Mushonga, a lawyer, won a seat in parliament in the March vote on the strength of a village-by-village organization that Tsvangirai's party had assembled in rural Mashonaland.

After Chaona, Mushonga turned that organization into a defense force for his own village, Kodzwa.

The same militias that attacked Chaona worked their way south through Chiweshe, hitting Jingamvura, Bobo and, on May 28, Kodzwa, where 200 families live.

Shortly after dawn, Mushonga's 46-year-old brother, Leonard, and 10 other opposition activists cornered five of the ruling-party fighters. One militia member was armed with a bayonet, another a traditional club known as a knobkerrie.

One of the ruling-party men, Leonard Mushonga said, was identified as Zacks Kanhukamwe, 47, a member of the Zimbabwe National Army. A second man, Petros Nyguwa, 45, was listed as a member of Mugabe's presidential guard.

The death toll mounted through May, and almost all of the fatalities were opposition activists. Even some of Mugabe's stalwarts grew uneasy, records show.

Vice President Joice Mujuru, wife of former guerrilla commander Solomon Mujuru and a woman whose ferocity during the warring 1970s earned her the nickname Spill Blood, warned in a May 14 politburo meeting that the violence might backfire. Notes from that and other meetings, as well as interviews with participants, make clear she was overruled repeatedly by Chiwenga, the military head, and by former security chief Emerson Mnangagwa, known as the Butcher of Matabeleland.

He earned his nickname in the mid-1980s overseeing the so-called Gukurahundi, when a North Korea-trained brigade slaughtered thousands of in a southwestern region where Mugabe was unpopular.

The opposition's resistance in Chiweshe gradually withered under militia attacks.

After the Kodzwa stalemate, the militias continued moving south in June, reaching Manomano in the region's southwestern corner a week before the runoff vote. Opposition leader Gibbs Chironga had won a seat in the Manomano council as part of Tsvangirai's first-round landslide.

About 150 militia members, some carrying AK-47 rifles, circled the Chironga family home.

Gibbs Chironga was killed by a militia member, said Hilton Chironga, his 41-year-old brother, who was wounded.

His brother, sister and mother were beaten, handcuffed and forced to drink a herbicide that burned their mouths and faces, relatives said. Hilton Chironga and his 76-year-old mother, Nelia Chironga, were taken to a Harare hospital, barely able to eat or speak. The whereabouts of his sister remain unknown.

On election day, militias drove voters to the polls and tracked through ballot serial numbers those who refused to vote or who cast ballots for Tsvangirai. The 84-year-old leader took the oath of office two days later, for a sixth time.