Zimbabwe's war veterans have a new hero. The first image you see on entering their office, in a grimy concrete block in downtown Harare, is a slightly wonky, black and white poster, bearing the legend "The Great Leader", and a picture of a familiar figure striding through the desert, swathed in long robes - Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi and his entourage swept through Zimbabwe in July. The Libyan leader has thrown his weight behind President Robert Mugabe's campaign to liberate the land from the inheritors of the British colonial legacy. A few days after he stopped in the provincial town of Chinhoyi, 23 white farmers were arrested on charges of violence against Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. Dozens of farms were looted by "war veterans" - most of them too young ever to have fought in the war of independence, which ended in 1980.

Gaddafi has promised to bail out Mugabe, whose country is facing economic collapse. Last month, the Zimbabwean government-run Herald newspaper trumpeted a deal in which the state-owned Libyan Arab Foreign Bank would extend US$1m a day in credit so that Zimbabwe can buy Libyan petrol, diesel and jet fuel.

It is not yet clear what the colonel gets in return. The Libyan Arab People's Bureau is to take over Gracelands, one of Mugabe's mansions, built for his second wife, Grace, near Harare. Libyan companies are to buy or be given several hotels on game reserves from where tourists, wary of reports of violence, are absent.

Gaddafi might like to meet Philemon Matibe, one of Zimbabwe's most successful black commercial farmers, who in 1999, after 17 years working as a profit-sharing manager on white-owned farms, fulfilled a lifelong dream and bought his own. One day in June, the district administrator of Chegutu, accompanied by Zanu-PF militants, "war veterans" and villagers, arrived on the Matibes' farm and ordered him and his family to leave.

"They had a hat, so they put bottle-tops with numbers in the hat. The villagers had to pick a number, and that was the plot they were allocated." Matibe, his wife and two children gathered what they could of their belongings and left. A week later, their farm was burnt to the ground.

Last week, I wandered around the burnt-out shell of the farmhouse, blackened ashes of maize cobs, fields of charred tobacco and wheat. "I have lost everything. All my life savings," said Matibe. He knows what he did wrong. As a leading member of Zimbabwe's opposition party, he was regarded as an enemy of the state. "I was targeted specifically because of my membership of the Movement for Democratic Change," he said.

Mugabe's government does not regard the MDC as a legitimate opposition, even though it won nearly half the seats in last year's parliamentary elections. "They're a sponsored group . . . the result of efforts by white commercial farmers who wanted to defeat our land reorganisation programme, and sponsored, financed and sustained that party," said John Nkomo, the minister for home affairs. At first he denied that Matibe had been forced off his farm. Then he justified it: "Anyone who becomes a tool of the colonial legacy cannot be safe from the programme of land redistribution."

Zimbabwe's political struggle, fuelled by Zanu-PF's campaign of intimidation against Mugabe's opponents, is as vicious now as during the independence war and the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s.

The case of Vusa Mkweli offers an insight into Mugabe's campaign to win next year's presidential elections. Mkweli and Maxwell Taruvinga, both members of the MDC, were arrested on 8 August and accused of political violence. The two men were thrown into the same police cell. Mkweli had been epileptic for a year, ever since Zanu-PF youths assaulted him during the parliamentary election campaign. But, according to Taruvinga, for two days the police would not let his friend retrieve his medicines from home. At first, he had fits every five minutes. Then every two. "Then he passed away," Taruvinga said.

I met Taruvinga as he was carried into the offices of a human rights organisation in Harare, a plaster on one leg, bandages on the other, his face creased in pain. He is now dependent on charity for food, shelter and medical expenses. He will go to stay in one of a network of "safe houses", places where the victims of violence can hide; they are too scared to go home to villages where their houses have been destroyed and their enemies still pursue them.

The Zimbabwean government says opposition activists such as Taruvinga and Mkweli are not victims, but the instigators of political violence. "The so-called human rights groups are themselves violators of human rights. Some of them have been sponsored by outsiders who would like to destabilise Zimbabwe," claimed Nkomo.

Philemon Matibe thought that these kinds of atrocities occurred only elsewhere in Africa. After 20 years of peace and relative prosperity, Zimbabwe was never expected to be like this. "I used to brag that we are different Africans," he said. "I felt that we were an example to the rest of Africa on how to run an economy and how to coexist. Now I'm embarrassed that I'm a Zimbabwean."

Colonel Gaddafi, presumably, is not embarrassed. For him, Zimbabwe is a new project, a way of making his mark on a world that had dismissed him as a has-been. The people of Zimbabwe are unlikely to thank him for his contribution to the struggle against imperialism.

Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for Channel 4 News