you would come, has come. Then those 3 would go away. At night they will send this group of trained militia, ex combatants and brutalised farm workers to make the numbers. The professionals will be there, the militias, ex combatants, and army guys but they add the numbers with the brutalised farm workers so that you are terrified by the numbers, it’s a game of numbers. So they will ferry them using the confiscated tractors from the commercial farmers. Now they are taking them from forest estates. That is where they are taking lorries and tractors to do operations and go back. The police will come and pick the bodies. They take them at night they do the operations They take them back. They are at the mortuary. They have never arrested anybody. Nobody has been arrested. They will just go and pick the bodies, put them in the mortuary, get the post mortem and file it away. They are under strict instructions not to do anything. The idea I think is to traumatize the community up to a certain stage where they would now open up for the [election] observers - then they will say no it’s peaceful while these guys will have been chickened. These atrocities are being committed by war veterans, the army and the CIO. We have more than 10 cars in Mazowe central with no number plates. Who can drive a car on the roads with no number plates and get away with it? It’s all the state agents. They are the ones who have these torture camps in their farms. They are occupying the farms - that is where they are doing the torture. [interview, Mazowe, 8 May 2008] In Mashonaland, violence has become mob violence. The son of the first man to be killed reported that around 500 people came to kill his father. Human rights organisations in town are reporting that among those fleeing are youth who have left their rural areas after being forced to join these murderous mobs. This same general strategy has been implemented in Gokwe Nembudziya where there has been intense violence, and to a lesser degree of intensity in parts of Manicaland and Masvingo provinces. 2. Matabeleland: the strategy The strategy to win the run off, as exemplified in the April document (appendix 3) has been implemented in Matabeleland North and South, but without much of the violence evident in Mashonaland. Most seats in Matabeleland were won by the MDCs, with ZANU PF winning only 7 out of 39 seats in this region. Matabeleland was devastated by violence in the 1980s, yet still voted overwhelming for ZAPU in the 1985 elections. A youth militia from Mashonaland who has been deployed to the region recently told the authors that they have been told there is no point beating people in Matabeleland as that has been tried before and it did not change how people voted! Furthermore, the ex-ZIPRA leadership of the army and some traditional leaders have also shown a reluctance to ferment violence in Matabeleland, which could also explain the comparative lack of overt beatings. 77 However, a very structured campaign of intimidation is in process, which has succeeded in displacing key people in the MDC structures at ward and district level. In Matabeleland, around three or four army units have been established per district, with groups of war veterans in every ward. There are usually between 20 and 30 wards per constituency, which means that everyone now lives within a few kilometres of one of these intimidating groups. Again, this is entirely consistent with the alleged master plan. Matabeleland residents are being forced to attend highly threatening meetings, run by local ZANU PF structures, war veterans and youth militia, at which people are made to sign their names on “death” lists, and to surrender their MDC cards and t-shirts. In some areas, coerced attendance at all night pungwes has begun, at which people have to sing songs in praise of ZANU PF and condemning MDC. However, the beating and torture being experienced in the “torture camps” of Mashonaland are so far more or less absent. 77 There have nonetheless been some validated reports of beatings in Matabeleland, mainly by youth militia brought in from outside the region, for example at Hwange/Gwayi in the north and West Nicholson in the south, as well by war vets in resettled farming areas. JOC itself has not been implicated in beatings in Matabeleland so far. 37