"We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it," the president told a crowd of supporters in Harare at the funeral of a former army general.

MDC leader Morgan Tsvan-girai will face Mugabe in a run-off presidential election on June 27, after winning the first round in March but without the necessary majority.

Tsvangirai, rights groups and Western powers accuse Mugabe of unleashing a brutal campaign, including using police to harass opponents, to win the run-off. Tsvangirai and 11 MDC campaign colleagues were held by police for three hours yesterday after being taken into custody at a roadblock in the morning. He has been detained several times this month.

Meanwhile, Tendai Biti, the party's secretary-general who was arrested on Thursday as he returned to the country, appeared before a judge.

At the closed hearing, prosecutors said they planned to charge him with "treason and making malicious statements detrimental to … the state", which could carry a death penalty, Biti's lawyer said.

Police took Biti – accused of announcing results of the March 29 poll prematurely – away after the hearing and said they might bring him back to court tomorrow, the lawyer told reporters.

Mugabe's ZANU-PF lost control of parliament in elections also held in March but the president, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980, has shown little sign of accepting change.

"It is clearly impossible to talk about a free and fair election in Zimbabwe," the MDC said after their leader was detained. "To suggest otherwise is to be blind to the grave harassment, intimidation and violence that the people of Zimbabwe have had to endure over the past few years."

The MDC says 66 of its followers have been killed in attacks since the March polls. Mugabe, 84, blames the MDC for the violence that has caused international concern.

His language has grown increasingly belligerent. He said again yesterday that Western countries were interfering. "We have become the focus of the British and the Americans. The US has provided $70m to the MDC for regime change ... and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is interfering in our internal affairs.

"Never again shall this country come under the rule of the white man, direct or indirect. Not while we, who fought for its liberation, live," Mugabe said to wild cheers from thousands of supporters, including soldiers.

The former guerrilla commander had told ZANU-PF youth members in Harare a day earlier that liberation war veterans had told him they would launch a new bush war if he lost the run-off.

Mugabe's sentence of death on women of Zimbabwe

Kevin Kane
in Johannesburg

ABIGAIL Murewa is a mother at the age of just 19 and her son is already well past his first birthday. She has no income and dropped out of school before completing basic schooling. Her beautiful face and direct stare are haunting, as is the malnourished child tied to her back in a blanket.

One thing is certain about Abigail: she is likely to be dead before her son reaches the age of 16. Life expectancy for Zimbabwean women was down to only 34 years by early 2006, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), compared with 62 years in 1990. Now, two years later, life expectancy for Abigail is less than 34 years.

Thirty-four, an age when women in stable democracies are thinking about careers, starting families, or buying homes, is by far the lowest life expectancy in the world. Even in Iraq, women can expect to live for more than 51 years. In poor countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, women's life expectancy is 75 and 65 respectively.

Inscriptions on the headstones of hundreds of graves at the Granville cemetery in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital and Abigail Murewa's home, tell the harrowing tale of women's life expectancy in a country where 3,500 citizens a week die from HIV/Aids, higher than the overall death rate in Darfur where Sudanese government forces are accused of genocide.

But the rate is increasing in the government violence that has followed this year's March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections. And the deaths have accelerated with the approach of the presidential run-off poll scheduled for June 27, with women taking the brunt of the violence perpetrated by the militiamen of incumbent President Robert Mugabe, who has given veteran militias permission to wage war on his opponent, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Mugabe told a ruling Zanu-PF party rally that Tsvangirai will return the country to white control if he wins the run-off. The veterans, Mugabe's followers during the 1970s war against white rule, are not prepared to recognise a Tsvangirai victory, said Mugabe. "They said they got this country through the barrel of a gun, so they cannot let it go by a ballot."

One woman who got in the way of Mugabe's militiamen was Dadirai Chipiro, wife of Patson Chipiro, leader of the MDC in Mhondoro, 100 miles northeast of Harare. Three truckloads of militiamen came looking for Patson 10 days ago but, in his absence, they turned on Dadirai, a 45-year-old nursery teacher, and broke both her legs before chopping off both her feet and one of her hands. In one of the most diabolical of many barbarous acts of evil perpetrated by Mugabe's regime since independence in 1980, the militiamen then threw Dadirai into her hut, barricaded the door and tossed a petrol bomb through the window. Police refused to issue a crime incident report. At the funeral Dadirai's coffin lid remained ajar because her outstretched arm had burned rigid.

Women have been right in Zimbabwe's front line – more so than the MDC's male leaders – opposing Mugabe and his hitmen, and few have been braver than Jennie Williams and Betty Makoni while living to tell their stories.

Williams, a so-called 'coloured' (mixed race) Zimbabwean, is a future contender for the Nobel Peace Prize – provided she survives her current incarceration in the notorious Chikurubi Prison, near Harare, where conditions have been described as worse than Auschwitz.

Williams founded WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise) as a women's civil rights movement in 2003. In the past five years Williams and the WOZA women have been constantly going on to the streets to demonstrate against the Mugabe government when MDC chiefs have been too frightened to do so. The 40,000-strong movement flouts restrictive protest laws in non-violent marches of thousands of women, many with their children strapped to their backs.

Some 30,000 WOZA women have spent time in police custody, many more than once, for their street protests against Mugabe's excesses. Under the slogan "Tough love", they have demonstrated to the timid MDC the possibilities of mass mobilisation, suffering beatings and near-unbearable prison conditions to exercise their fundamental freedoms.

But her followers and Amnesty International are deeply worried about the fate of Williams. She has been in custody at Chikurubi for 18 days with 13 other WOZA activists, including Williams' deputy Magodonga Mahlangu, after a street demonstration in Harare on Africa Day on May 28 against government violence following the March election.

Under Mugabe's draconian decree, the WOZA marchers, who carried placards and distributed flyers condemning the violence, were stopped by police and their leaders arrested. Williams' bail was set at 10,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars (£10 under Zimbabwe's inflation rate of 500,000%), but the police refused to release her. Williams is charged with "participating in a gathering with intent to promote public violence" and "causing disaffection among the Police Force".

The evidence produced by the state relates to a paragraph in one of the WOZA flyers addressed to Zimbabwe's uniformed forces which said: "We ask them to respect that Zimbabweans have voted (on March 29] for change and refrain from being used to perpetrate violence and to carry out injustices."

Betty Makoni is also a potential Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her campaigns against rape – as a weapon of political intimidation by Mugabe's militias and in Zimbabwean society more widely.

As a child labourer aged six, she was raped by a neighbour together with nine other girls. Makoni is now aged 37. But none of the others violated that day are still alive to tell their stories.

Makoni eventually went to university and became a teacher. She now administers a Girl Child Network with nearly 700 clubs. In its nine-year history the Network has helped more than 60,000 females who have been raped, ranging from a one-day-old baby to a 94-year-old grandmother.

Among Makoni's recent honours are the 2008 Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for Women's and Children's Rights and the 2007 World Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child

"As I speak now, I know a woman is getting killed," Makoni said at a public lecture she gave last week in Toronto. "There's a silent genocide going on… I've picked up stories about women who are raped in front of their grandchildren, in front of their sons, in front of their daughter, and of women forced to be raped by their own relatives… I think the idea is to destroy the womb that brings their opponents in the country into the world."

She has been jailed several times and receives constant death threats.

But Makoni was today flying back to Harare to share with Williams, the women of WOZA, and the country's countless rape victims a struggle against the increasingly merciless onslaught by Mugabe and his security force chiefs.

Migrant 'necklaced' to death

Anti-foreigner rioting flared up again yesterday in a South African township as a foreign migrant from Mozambique, as yet unidentified, was "necklaced" to death.

The death brought to 63 the number of people who have died in the ethnic cleansing that broke out last month and has seen the poorest areas of the country emptied of black migrants from other parts of Africa, particularly Zimbabwe.

Necklacing was the method used in black townships in the 1980s and early 1990s to kill suspected 'sell-outs' to the former apartheid government.

It involved jamming a car tyre over the shoulders of the victim, filling it with petrol and setting it ablaze.

The necklacing in the Pretoria township of Atteridgeville is the second of a Mozambican migrant in the wave of anti-immigrant attacks. Early reports suggested clashes occurred between residents of Atteridgeville and Somali migrants housed in a nearby United Nations-run refugee camp. Police opened fire and fires were burning.

Meanwhile, about 100 people turned out for an anti-xenophobia march in central Johannesburg yesterday afternoon organised by the International Community Unifiers (ICU), a group representing the five million African migrants in South Africa.

Dennis Mpangane, the ICU president, said: "We do not understand why we have been savagely and brutally assaulted, raped, killed, intimidated.

"We have had our property destroyed and looted and we have been evicted from our homes and experienced all forms of humiliation."