diamond snapshots 2

The police came to S's house in Greenside suburb one morning this week. Her husband had already left for the shop. "We want to see your husband," an officer said. There were two carloads of police waiting outside. "Who is your husband?

S. gives his name. The officer consults his list. "Sorry, wrong house," he says. The police drive on.

The helicopter leaves Mutare early in the morning, six-ish, they say. Known diamond dealers are rounded up during the night, pulled out of their flats. The police are checking big cars on the roads, asking where they've come from. The first thing the dealers did was to buy big SUVs, Prados. They cruise the streets, numberplate-less.

We've heard the hooting at the gates, loud and persistent, early in the morning. Too early for the school run, which is normally around 7. This is earlier, 5 or 6 am. It's not just black Zimbabweans they're arresting. They've taken in a white businessman (C.W?) too. An Asian guy (Mr E.) was taken out to the Chiadzwa diamond fields and made to fill up a crater dug by the illegal diggers "with his bare hands," a member of the Asian community says. What if someone's given the police the wrong names out of spite? I lurk by the kitchen window, worrying when vans go too slowly past the gate.

There are whispers of beatings and worse. Our gardener has heard of seven bodies with gunshot wounds brought to the central police station from Chiadzwa last Saturday. "Ask anyone at the Holiday Inn, they saw them," a rights worker says. (Holiday Inn is opposite Mutare Central). A policeman from R. came to collect the body of his brother from a private funeral parlour, a senior MDC official says. The brother was a digger killed in Chiadzwa. The policeman doesn't want to talk.

"They shoot you," says Mai Agnes, whose friend Mai Alfred has just come back from Chiadzwa. "If you take two steps forward the soldiers shoot you."