The lanky young man on the outer circle of the rally kept clutching at his pants, which were too big around the waist and too short in the leg, exposing limbs as thin as reeds.

His skin was stretched so tight across his cheekbones it was scuffed gray in patches. He grinned, sang, and danced, taller than those around him, waving long arms in the engaging open-palm sign of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

He seemed happy, at least from a distance. He also had no shoes and his MDC T-shirt looked worn enough to be a leftover from the country’s last phony election in 2002 when President Mugabe won six more years in power.

Standing a few yards away from people sitting under trees in dappled afternoon sunlight were election observers from South Africa’s African National Congress, veterans of two democratic elections.

They were observing Zimbabwe’s ninth national parliamentary or presidential poll since independence in 1980.

Then it was one of Africa’s biggest food producers; it is now impoverished, its people hungry, its land unproductive.

The election will almost certainly be rigged. The only question is whether Mr. Mugabe achieves the two-thirds majority he needs to change the constitution and choose his successor.

The South Africans were obviously foreigners. Their skin glowed, their fingers were smooth, their shoes and sunglasses and cell phones set them apart from the shabby crowd of about 700 who came to hear a message of hope from their candidate at a village five hours’ drive southwest of the capital Harare. Mandla Dlamini, one of the observers from the ANC’s election unit in Johannesburg, said he was relieved that the pre-election period was “peaceful.”

I told him I was looking for a ruling Zanu PF rally in the area. He said the police would help. I could only laugh at the suggestion that anyone would willingly go to a police station.

“This is not 2002,” he said. That’s true, it isn’t the 2002 elections, when MDC supporters were hunted down like animals. The tactics are more subtle this time.

But, Mr. Dlamini, it is too soon to go into a police station. Since working here for nearly four years as a reporter, I have met too many people who only went because they had been arrested, including me.

Some were paying traffic fines or delivering food to imprisoned friends and found themselves locked up for the weekend in cells designed by the British for six inmates.

Now policemen shove in 30 at a time; the prisoners sleep standing in the cell or in broken lavatories where water is flushed at the whim of a policeman outside.

It will take longer than a few largely peaceful weeks for me or millions of Zimbabweans to begin to trust Mr. Mugabe’s policemen again.

As a foreigner, Mr. Dlamini wouldn’t know when he drove later that day to the second city Bulawayo that the grass in fields alongside the road should have been shorter this time of year.

He wouldn’t realize that it is tall – even after poor summer rain – because there are no cattle left to eat it; that the occasional 100 sq yard patch of maize along a 75-mile stretch of road is not enough to feed those who attended the rally he had just “observed.”

More than the crumbling pavements and the potholes in what were some of Africa’s best roads, more than the uncollected trash stinking in the streets and the decay consuming schools and hospitals, it is the desolation and consequences of empty fields along familiar roads that hurts the most.

When Prince Charles lowered the Union Jack 25 years ago, Zimbabwe was edgy and tense after a long and bitter guerrilla war led by Mr. Mugabe. He calmed white Rhodesians by offering to forget that they had locked him up for 10 years because he wanted to vote.

It was white farmers and their workers, encouraged by Mr. Mugabe to remain, who provided the engine to generate economic stability that allowed Zimbabwe to be a new hope in Africa.

But before long, Mr. Mugabe had already begun killing his first enemies: the people of Matabeleland. After crushing them, he turned on white farmers, a convenient scapegoat in Africa, especially as they did own a disproportionate amount of land.

They would be blamed for helping create the MDC, as if millions of black Zimbabweans couldn’t decide for themselves that they wanted a world beyond Robert Mugabe. So he began killing them, too, and chasing them off their farms.

My cell phone has rung too often for too long with people who have nowhere else to turn, and I can’t do anything to help. My phone rang a few minutes ago. A young South African woman from an unofficial observer group has been attacked on a bus 45 miles from Harare.

She was sobbing in the background as a contact told me her story; that Zanu PF men beat her up and tried to rape her.

I will try to find Mr. Dlamini and tell him. There is no point going to the police.