By ALEX DUVAL SMITH
MUREHWA - The morgue attendant at Musami Mission pulls out the coolroom drawer. Farmer Dave Stevens' body is semi-dressed and his arms lie in a cross above his chest, as though in a position of self-defence.
His is one face of Zimbabwe.
Another face can be found smiling, laughing and drinking celebratory beers 10km away in Murehwa. In the gardens of Zexcom (Zimbabwe ex-combatants) the mood is defiant as 200 men and women, wearing ruling party T-shirts, chant and dance.
But the more representative face of Zimbabwe is of terror, both black and white. At Murehwa's bus stop, people tell of the gunshots they heard at the weekend as "the Zexcom people" raced through town, opening fire on a white farmer's ute.
Speaking to white journalists, or anyone with a pale skin, is life-threatening, says one woman. "The Zexcom people march around town in their T-shirts and orange caps, firing into the air as if they own our town. We are terrified," she says, and then runs away.
Sixty kilometres away, at Marondera, 80 burly white farmers, many with eyes that cried all night, meet at the country club to decide what to do in the wake of Stevens' abduction and murder.
Fifty-year-old Stevens' greatest sin, it seems, was to have worked towards a democratic Zimbabwe. He was a counsellor on the farmers' own town committee, set up to keep things working while the official body, dominated by stalwarts of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), ran the infrastructure into the ground. Stevens was a known supporter of the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Last week, invaders who had been squatting on his tobacco farm beat up several of Stevens' workers, apparently because they had been to an MDC meeting.
At the weekend the workers retaliated - a move seen by the invaders as commanded by Stevens. Then the invaders returned with a busload of war veterans.
"Their intention was to kill right from the start," says John Osborne, who was with Stevens when the 30-strong mob arrived.
Osborne, aged 49, is in hospital at Marondera. Four other white farmers were also injured: Gary Luke, Steve Krynauw, Stuart Gemmill and Ian Hardy, whose price for intervening was a fractured skull, severe bruising, whip and rifle-butt wounds.
Krynauw, 52, was beaten at the Zexcom compound, together with Luke, 44.
"Our hands were bound with cord and they hit us with their fists. They kept saying we would die," says Krynauw, who is also in hospital.
"After a few hours they put us in the back of a pick-up and drove up with Dave's body, which they just dumped on top of us. Gary says I blacked out. They took our shoes but said they would come back.
"We left Dave's body there. We walked 10 or 15km barefoot until we got to a farm where we broke the lock, found some car keys and drove to safety."
Hardy and Gemmill, unable to walk because of their injuries, crawled through the bush from where they had been dumped.
All the survivors feel Zimbabwe is out of control. Their organisation, the Commercial Farmers' Union, has advised them not to return to their farms for the time being.
Yet one of the leaders of the invaders, War Veterans' Association general secretary Agrippa Gava, remains unrepentant.
"Of course this is not a tragedy. Any whites who die are just casualties of the process," he says. "They are all English foreigners who live on stolen land. Deaths are what happen in the process of a conflict."
An official at the British High Commission in Harare said the office had been swamped by whites registering to reclaim their British citizenship.
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