The Paramount disco was packed with young Zimbabweans having a good time last month when three armoured vehicles pulled up outside. Soldiers stormed out, sealed off the entrances and ordered everyone to lie down. Then they started the beating.
"They smashed my glass of beer and cut me with it. Then they hit me all over with batons. I almost lost consciousness," one man said quietly in a back room of the club last week. His forehead was marked by a fresh scar crossed by five rough stitches.
On the same night dozens more were badly injured in neighbouring bars. In the VIP club the soldiers smashed snooker cues over patron's backs. The customers' only crime was to live in Chitungwiza - one of the many townships of Harare which is also a stronghold of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party.
"We lived through the Smith regime," said the man, and it was tough. But I have to be frank: things were better then." He refused to be named.
Fear has become the instrument of rule in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, a country where judges, journalists and opposition politicians have all been targeted in recent weeks as the ruling elite ruthlessly consolidates its hold on power.
Last year government-sponsored thugs ousted white farmers from their land in an effort to win votes and divert attention from the woefully mismanaged economy, crippled by soaring inflation and over 50 per cent unemployment. But it hasn't worked, so now Mugabe has ordered a purge of all independent voices.
Even the country's most senior judge has been ousted. Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay made a spirited attempted to resist government attempts to remove him from office. When the government claimed he had been fired last Thursday week, the eminent 68-year-old legal practitioner defiantly turned up for work on Friday.
But, in the end, the government won the day. Following intensive negotiations, Justice Gubbay agreed to take early retirement.
Last December a gang of war veterans - the dangerous alliance of true liberation fighters and Zanu-PF thugs terrorising rural areas - burst into the Supreme Court and broke up the proceedings. The police have failed to arrest anyone, proof if it was needed that the war vets have become a law unto themselves.
The leader of that group, fiery war vet Joseph Chinotimba, turned up at the Harare courthouse where Justice Gubbay was making his defiant stand last Thursday week. With two other men, he asked if Justice Gubbay was in his chambers, then departed in a move intended to intimidate him.
"We're all afraid now," said one High Court judge last week from behind the high walls of a suburban house with an armed guard on the gate. "The way the government is reacting we will find war vets on our front lawns soon, or even worse, tanks on the streets."
Justice Gubbay's "crime" was to lead a December 21st judgment on the controversial land reform programme. While conceding that Zimbabwe's serious land problem must be urgently addressed - a tiny minority of white farmers own the cream of the country's rich farmland - Mugabe's programme was "entirely haphazard and unlawful". He said: "Wicked things have been, and are being, committed with impunity. Laws made by parliament have been flouted by the government. The activities of the last nine months must be condemned."
Last Wednesday week in parliament, ruling party MPs were tripping over themselves to denigrate the judge. He had links to "powerful Jewish financial interests" and "thinks and behaves as if he is the last British governor of Zimbabwe", said Christopher Mushohwe of Zanu-PF.
"Anybody who knows Gubbay knows those statements are outrageously false," said one friend.
In one of many ironies, Robert Mugabe's liberation government appointed British-born Gubbay as Chief Justice in 1990. In the 1970s he had made a reputation for himself as one of the few liberal white lawyers in Ian Smith's repressive and shunned regime.
In the late 1970s he led the appeal for an Irish Catholic bishop, Donal Lamont, in a case where the prelate had been accused of aiding liberation "terrorists" and sentenced to prison. Under Gubbay's stewardship, the bishop was freed and allowed to leave the country.
The South African government is one of the few that still has an influence on Robert Mugabe. President Thabo Mbeki has been slow to criticise one of his closest neighbours and fellow liberation fighters but has been hurt by the impact of continuing strife into South Africa. Last Sunday week he issued his strongest statement yet, expressing his "serious concern" at unfolding events in Zimbabwe.
THE South African High Commissioner last week said his country would support any United Nations motion to censure Mugabe. "But we can't act alone because we would become isolated from our neighbours," said Mr Azwindini Ndou.
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai confirmed last week that the opposition was toning down its operations. "Rallies are out, protests are out. We're not going to give him a reason to clamp down on us."
The printing presses of the Daily News were fire-bombed in January but the independent paper is still on the streets. Editor Geoffrey Nyarota criticised the MDC's move to scale down. "That's exactly what the government wants. The MDC should carry on with their programme, they have a responsibility to keep themselves alive."
With the economy in tatters and a food shortage looking likely this year, the smart money is on an early presidential election, possibly in August. "I'm told we are looking for the money and once it's in the kitty we'll go," said a disillusioned member of the decimated Zanu-PF liberal wing.