Robert Mugabe's Reign of Terror 'The Fear' by By Peter Godwin

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...In 2008 Godwin — one of the few Western journalists then remaining in the country — travels from Harare to rural Zimbabwe (including his birthplace, Chimanimani), documenting the bloodshed. He visits hospitals overflowing with maimed, bludgeoned, burned victims. “Think of deep, bone-deep lacerations, of buttocks with no skin left on them, think of being flayed alive,” he writes of a torture method called falanga. “Think of swollen, broken feet, of people unable to stand, unable to sit, unable to lie on their backs because of the blinding pain.” In one of the most riveting sequences in “The Fear,” Godwin joins James McGee, the burly, no-nonsense American ambassador, on a fact-finding trip outside Harare. Confronted repeatedly by gun-toting policemen, militia members and intelligence agents, McGee bravely brushes them aside as he and his team gather evidence of torture and murder. (On this trip, Godwin wanders into a farmhouse used as a torture center by Mugabe’s hit teams and riffles through a notebook that documents interrogations and names people “who are to be beaten.”) Finally advised to leave the country for his own safety, he watches from New York as Tsvangirai withdraws from the June 27 runoff, saying he cannot participate in a “violent, illegitimate sham.”