When the militia came for the boys, Caroline hid inside. Scores of teenagers from her neighbourhood had already been forced from their homes to become foot soldiers for the Zanu (PF) militia. At night she could hear them scouring the streets for opposition supporters, forcing them to indoctrination meetings where they were beaten and denounced.

But as the election neared, they came for the girls too, desperate to swell their ranks with young recruits. Caroline, 17, was marched to a Zanu (PF) base at a derelict house on the edge of Mbare slum, handed a baton and ordered into the next room.

“They said I had to beat somebody they had caught or they would beat me,” she recounts. “But when I got there, they raped me, one by one.”

Untold numbers of women, old and young, have been raped during weeks of state-orchestrated terror in Zimbabwe, but shame and stigma has prevented most from speaking out.

Several female activists from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have been dragged from their homes and gang-raped; still more common has been the sexual assault of women abducted in place of their politically active menfolk.

But perhaps the least known and most numerous groups are the young girls forced to join the ruling party’s own militia, who are systematically raped to cow them into submission and forced to carry out acts of violence against their own neighbours or face more brutality themselves.

Whichever group they belong to, the rape victims of Mugabe’s terror campaign continue suffering long after much of the other violence has died down, unaware of what the future holds.

“It was two weeks ago it started and still I am shaking,” Caroline says. “Maybe I am pregnant or maybe I have the HIV now. I do not know what to do now. No one can help.”

The sudden proliferation of youth militias across Zimbabwe was fuelled by the forced recruitment of thousands of underage boys.

David, an opposition supporter from the notorious Epworth township, had his 16-year-old son taken from the house every night for five weeks to join the militias in their rampages around the streets. “He is just a boy but I could not stop him, the big ones would have beat me,” David says. He still cannot bring himself to ask his son what he was made to do.

Caroline knows all too well. “It was a week before the election and the trouble was getting worse,” she said. “The Zanu (PF) chairman said that in the Eighties when there was war, girls fought too so we need them to fight this time too.” So the boys drew up lists of all the teenage girls in their neighbourhood and went to take them from their houses.”

Caroline was led to a house in Adbeni used as a militia base. Opposition supporters were taken there from the pungwes (indoctrination meetings) held elsewhere. Caroline was led into a room by two older militia leaders in their twenties to administer a beating. “But instead they raped me, the two of them, in turn.” Afterwards they took her to another room where a woman was lying face down on the ground. They told her she must beat her with the rope and baton they had given her. “I said ‘How can I beat her, she is older than me? How can I beat someone who is like my mother, my grandmother?’.” The face of her own mother, two years dead from Aids, loomed in front of her. But she remembered the horror of the rape and did what she was told. The next day she ran away from Mbare, to her grandmother’s house in Highfield. But her older brother went looking for her. She had not told him the truth about what happened.

“He said, ‘You have to go back to the base or they will beat us too’,” she recalls. “And I had seen many people badly beaten, who are disabled now from beating, so I had to go back.” When she got there, the militia leader was angry. He took her into the room and raped her again. Then he forced her to drink strong alcohol and sent her to beat the people again.

During the daytime when she was allowed home, Caroline would see the people she had helped to beat hobbling through the streets.

“I’d say, ‘I am sorry, we are forced to do it’,” she said. “And I’d say do whatever they want so they don’t beat you. They don’t know what is in their hearts.” She did not tell them of the rape that she was enduring night after night; the militiamen had told her they would kill her if she told.

The ordeal only stopped when the election was over. “Now they have left us alone, they are happy their president won,” Caroline said. In other parts of the country, the violence has continued, but Mbare is quiet for now. Caroline’s soul is not.

“I do not think I will ever be happy again in my life,” she sobs quietly into her T-shirt. Two weeks after the first rape, it is still too early to know if she is pregnant and it will be months before she can discover whether she has been handed a death sentence too.

HIV is so prevalent in Zimbabwe - 3,000 people die of Aids-related illnesses every week - that rape victims who can afford them are given antiretroviral drugs to fight its onset.

Medical services for the poor, however, have ground virtually to a halt under the month-long aid work ban imposed by Mugabe’s regime.

Caroline can only guess how many other girls are carrying her same burden. “There were so many of them who were taken into the other rooms too and I heard the noises,” she says.

“But nobody will talk of it. It is a great shame. So each of us suffers alone.”

Homeless and hungry
200,000 - number of Zimbabweans internally displaced since the March elections 2,000 number of party militia bases erected in week after the elections 5 million people expected to need food aid in next 9 months
Source: www.reliefweb.com; www.thazonet.com; Times archives

Times Recommends

• Congo's rangers risk their lives to guard gorillas
• Pearl farming in China losing its lustre
• Axl Rose mystery as album arrives at last