The BBC’s Mike Thomson, in a series of reports from Zimbabwe in early June, spoke to “a Zimbabwean mother and (13-year-old) daughter who are still too afraid to return home after being abducted and repeatedly raped by militiamen from President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party a year ago.” (Its symbol is a clenched fist.) Their fear has not lessened despite the new alleged “power-sharing” coalition between Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change’s Morgan Tsvangirai.

Also still fearful is a woman, Patience, whom Thomson described as carrying a large book with “the names of people tortured, killed, raped or maimed by Zanu-PF mobs last year.” Mortuary officials, hospital officials and court clerks covertly helped compile the list.

Thompson asked Patience what would happen if she brought this crimes list to the police or the Ministry of Justice so those responsible would be prosecuted. (In this “coalition” government, Mugabe is still in tight personal control of the police, the spy service, the criminal justice system and the media.)

“I would be killed, even torn to pieces. I definitely believe that,” Patience answered, looking Thomson straight in the eye.

Even Mugabe’s rapists and murderers do not feel safe in Zimbabwe.

Thomson, who had reason not to feel safe himself in this police state, spoke about the incriminating evidence to the Movement for Democratic Change’s Sekai Holland, whose rawly ironic title in this coalition government is Minister of State for National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration. Ms. Holland has had acute personal experience in the need for healing since she herself had been beaten so viciously by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF surrogates that she was hospitalized for weeks.

“No one feels safe in Zimbabwe. No one,” she said. “Different members of the MDC are getting phone calls from people who give the names of people who are going to be assassinated (by clench-fisted Zanu-PF monsters).”

“I think,” the minister of State for National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration, continues, “there is a department which meets to plan the survival of Zanu-PF as a ruling party. We are told they do have a list of people they will kill.”

There have been many such fulfilled execution lists in the 29 years of Robert Mugabe’s reign of horror.

“If the inclusive government does not work, we are going very close to Somalia. We are going into the scorched earth policy,” Harare University professor of Politics, John Makumbe, predicts: “That is what Mugabe is going to do. Destroy everything in the name of ideology, destroy everyone.”

Who is going to stop him? The United Nations is as preeningly hollow as ever.

President Obama is concerned. On June 12, meeting with the Zimbabwe’s purported power-sharing prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai at the White House, Obama chided Mugabe. Rather mildly, Obama said Mugabe “has not acted oftentimes in the best interest of the Zimbabwean people and has been resistant to the kinds of democratic changes that need to take place.”

But, as Robert Rotberg — president of the World Peace foundation and director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict — says bluntly (Boston Globe, June 13): “Mugabe, insufferably confident and arrogant at 85, hardly wants to be upstaged by his much younger prime minister. He seeks to protect himself and his security cronies from being investigated for corrupt dealings and human rights abuses. The destruction of a prosperous, largely democratic Zimbabwe happened on their watch. The blood of thousands is on their hands.”

(Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.)