The opposition MDC party accuses President Robert Mugabe of trying to sabotage Tsvangirai's campaign in order to preserve his 28-year hold on power.

Six MDC lawmakers have been arrested for various offences since the March 29 poll, in which Tsvangirai beat Mugabe but failed to win the majority needed to avoid a run-off.

Eric Matinenga was arrested yesterday, two days after charges of inciting violence were dropped, MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.

"Advocate Eric Matinenga, MP for Buhera West, was arrested for the second time in an early morning raid by people claiming to be police," he said in a statement.

On Thursday a magistrate freed Matinenga, who had been arrested on allegations of inciting public violence in his constituency, saying he had been wrongly charged.

Chamisa accused Mugabe's government of stepping up a crackdown on the opposition ahead of the June 27 vote.

Mugabe, who lost the first round March 29 presidential election to Tsvangirai, also saw his Zanu-PF party lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 28 years.

Police detained Tsvangirai twice last week as he campaigned in the rural southwestern province of Matabeleland. He was released on Friday a few hours after being stopped by armed police at a roadblock.

Critics accuse Mugabe's government of embarking on a violent campaign to intimidate voters as he faces the task of reversing his electoral defeat.

Mugabe, however, blames the MDC for violence and his government this week ordered all aid agencies to stop their humanitarian programmes, saying they were interfering in politics.

The Southern African Development Community, a regional grouping of 14 nations, including Zimbabwe, is sending observers to monitor the run-off.

Tsvangirai's party, blaming state agents, says at least 60 of its supporters have been killed in the past two months.

The latest setback came as UN aid agencies said they were deeply concerned because aid groups have been ordered to halt operations. Millions of Zimbabweans depend on international groups for food and other aid as the economy crumbles. Without the private agencies, impoverished Zimbabweans will be dependent on the government and Mugabe's party, both of which distribute food and other aid.

Mugabe hits rural areas in campaign of mass terror

Kevin Kane in Johannesburg

THE soldiers are there every day now, warning villagers in the rural hinterlands of Harare that they will be moved into school buildings after voting in presidential run-off elections on June 27. If there has been a local majority for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, they will be immediately executed.

The picture in Mashonaland Central is part of a large-scale operation being conducted by the Zimbabwean Army in a bid to ensure Robert Mugabe retains power at the presidential run-off election on June 27.

The potency of the threats cannot be overstated in rural areas where there is widespread illiteracy and hunger, where superstitions abound and where there is no access to independent information.

It is in the rural areas, where the majority of Zimbabwe's people live, that Mugabe can most easily rig ballots. It is more difficult in the handful of cities and towns, where the electorate is more sophisticated, articulate and free from the centuries-old traditional structures of the countryside.

As the army, the police, youth militias and veterans of the 1970s independence war create mass terror, agents of Mugabe's much-feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) are targeting village chiefs.

In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in Africa, traditional leaders have always commanded profound respect in rural communities, where they preside over everything from the resolution of disputes to the sharing of resources. Chiefs and village headmen have been revered for most of Zimbabwe's independence history for the way they worked with Mugabe's guerrilla liberation forces in the struggle against the late Ian Smith's white minority government.

But with the emergence of a powerful opposition in the form of the MDC in 2000, 20 years after independence, chiefs, village headmen, sangomas (traditional healers or 'witch doctors'] and other customary leaders have been blatantly threatened, bribed, politicised and used by Mugabe's Zanu-PF party to marshal villagers behind the ruling party.

Chiefs are paid a generous monthly salary and given sports utility vehicles to keep them at the beck and call of Mugabe and Zanu-PF. The chiefs also maintain registers for distribution of sparse government food relief: unless a villager has a Zanu-PF membership card, he or she is struck from the register and goes hungry.

Reginald Matchaba-Hove, chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), a group of 40 organisations supporting democratic elections, said: "For many opposition supporters (in rural areas], fear of violence means they would prefer not to vote rather than vote and face the recriminations.

"The penalty for voting for the opposition can be expulsion from the village, physical violence, withdrawal from the food aid registers or all of them combined. Past experience has taught them that such threats are eventually carried out, and they fear a repeat of 2000, 2002 and 2005 (legislative and presidential elections and a referendum marred by widespread violence and intimidation]."

In Zimbabwe it takes months for important opposition news to filter into the countryside, large swathes of which have anyway been declared "no-go" areas by Mugabe's youth militias known as the Green Bombers, after their bottle green uniforms and also a particularly unpleasant blowfly. "We have become like turtles, just hiding in our shells until it is safe to come out again," said one old man.

Professor Elphas Mukonoweshuro, an MDC MP and the party's secretary for international affairs, said the rural areas currently resemble a war zone, with armed bands supporting the government moving across the whole of the country. "Personal security is a constant worry and none of us feel safe at all," he said. "It's virtually impossible to mount any meaningful campaign, even in urban areas."

Nelson Chamisa, an MDC spokesman and MP, said the violence to which the party is being subjected before the run-off poll in less than three weeks is the worst it has experienced since it was formed nine years ago from a broad coalition of civil society concerned about the country's decline under Mugabe.

"We are fighting a regime that is staring defeat in the face but is determined to stay in power and has become desperate," said Chamisa. "Our supporters are being maimed, tortured and killed, and no one has been arrested.

"This is a situation you can only expect to get from a barbaric state. The violence has displaced voters. A lot of our supporters have been forced out of their homesteads as a result of the violence (and therefore will not be able to vote].

"Everyone within the party's leadership is living in constant fear of being abducted and then tortured before being killed. We have to be careful. We are dealing with a vampire regime."

If Mugabe is to rig the ballot this time, it will have to be on a colossal and massively cynical scale. Against all his calculations and those of his military and security force chiefs, who are effectively running the country now, he lost the first round with just 43.2% of the national vote to 47.9% for Tsvangirai.

The MDC leader needed 50% plus at least one more vote to achieve outright victory and avoid a run-off.

The scale of the rigging needed for Mugabe to sweep home later this month has been described by Andrew Makoni, one of Zimbabwe's top human rights lawyers, who last week fled to South Africa after five of his clients, all MDC activists, were abducted, murdered and mutilated by Mugabe supporters.

Makoni said the run-off could not possibly be free and fair, because of the daily abductions and killings. In a truly fair election, he said Mugabe would get scarcely 20% of the vote, because people are hungry following the failure yet again to produce an adequate maize harvest despite good summer rains.

In the event that the rigging operation cannot overcome the sheer numbers who will turn out for Tsvangirai, however fearsome the violence and intimidation, the Brussels-based watchdog International Crisis Group argues in a new report that there is "a growing risk of a coup, either before the run-off, in a pre-emptive move to deny Tsvangirai victory, or after a Tsvangirai win."

MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti, widely tipped as the successor to Tsvangirai, fears the worst. Speaking last week in Cape Town at the World Economic Forum on Africa, he said: "The regime is increasing the decibels of insanity. At every level, it is telling the international community in a loud and clear voice that it is not prepared to play by the rules, it is not prepared to listen to logic, and most importantly it is not prepared to listen to democracy and the voice of its people."