Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe - Pikai sometimes drops in at Clay's home round the corner for a bite to eat and a chat, and Pikai returns the favour by letting his neighbour collect water from his tap that seldom runs dry. The odd thing about this neighbourly sharing is that 10 months ago Pikai - not his real name - was among a mob of vigilantes of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party flailing with sticks and heavy electric cables at Clay's back, because he was a supporter of the then opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

It was near the end of a blood-drenched campaign for the second round of presidential elections in which Clay was one of many thousands tortured by Mugabe's youth militias, soldiers and police.

In the end, 200 MDC supporters were murdered and the party's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew because of the scale of the violence, leaving the 85-year-old Mugabe to have himself declared president after a one-man race.

Clay said he had to sleep on his stomach for weeks to allow the wounds to heal. Today he cannot walk much further than a few hundred metres without enduring excruciating pain. But, he says, all he wants is for Pikai and his fellows to be prosecuted and for justice to be done. "I don't want to revenge."

The reconciliation between the two took place earlier this year after the Catholic church's Commission for Justice and Peace took the first steps toward trying to heal the deep psychological and spiritual trauma inflicted in the murderous three-month election campaign.

They gathered 16 victims of violence in Chitungwiza, to listen, talk and share experiences in group therapy sessions over two days.

Pikai and six other ZANU(PF) perpetrators were coaxed into separate workshops with the CCJP, along the lines of traditional cleansing rituals.

Only two of them were willing to admit involvement in the violence. When they started, Pikai was sweating and shaking uncontrollably as he talked of his brutality, said CCJP coordinator Joel Nkunsane.

"He said what he did was evil, that he caused death, and people to suffer. He wanted to look in the eyes of his neighbours, to go back and talk it out," he said.

The realisation of the need for reconciliation and healing came in October last year when Nkunsane and two colleagues were doing hundreds of interviews with torture victims, to prepare a detailed record.

"It was horrible, horrible," he said. "There were people so badly beaten they had to have a whole box of cotton wool stuffed in the hole in their buttocks. Women who had logs forced up their vaginas. People had their eyes gouged out. I couldn't take it. We had to go for counselling.

"But we saw that we were reopening their wounds four months after they had brutalised. We heard them, and then left, without aiding them and leaving them in their pain. Victims need not just blankets and food, they need spiritual healing as well."

Perhaps the most important factor was "the loss of human dignity, and their sense of worthlessness" after their ordeals, he said. "We helped to transform their pain."

However, violence, torture and murder have been visited repeatedly on Zimbabweans by Mugabe since he came to power 29 years ago. In the mid-1980s, about 20 000 civilians of the Ndebele tribe of western Zimbabwe were massacred by his security forces.

"The nation is still bleeding," Nkunsane said. "The stories of what happened are still coming, people in (the western city of) Bulawayo are talking about them as if they just happened.

"The real process is when the offender says to the offended, 'I'm sorry'," he said. "The victims also feel that justice must prevail." Zimbabwe's new coalition government between Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, its prime minister, have staged rallies where ZANU(PF) and MDC supporters join hands, and a cabinet committee on healing has been set up. But this is mostly rhetoric," said Nkunsane.

"I fear they may go for a process of blanket amnesty," he said, "that it happened 'in a time of madness, let's move on, let bygones be bygones.' That will leave people lying there, hurting in their wounds," he said.

If that happens, "there is never going to be a time that people are going to respect each other's opinions," he said. "At any other election, there will be bloodshed again." (dpa)