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In our issue last week, a reader wrote to us chronicling the painful events in some areas of Mashonaland Central such as Dotito, Chiutsa, Chahwanda and Mudzengerere where the reader, in his own words, says a few former guerrillas were causing terror.
In all these, and many other undocumented cries for help by ordinary Zimbabweans besieged by the lawless lot within the governing ZANU PF party, the scenario has been the same: a deafening silence from the police and other law enforcing agencies.
Our reader asked of the police at Dotito, as indeed of all other police officers stationed all over Zimbabwe:
Are they under specific orders not to take action? What is the position regarding the law? Has the government thrown away its responsibility of protecting citizens?
This week the human rights watchdog Amnesty International placed Zimbabwe back on the list of high-risk countries where the rights of individuals are daily assailed by the state and its organs with impunity.
Amnesty, in its report, said the independent Press in Zimbabwe was under siege from the government and its supporters. Independent journalists are being harassed and threatened.
Amnesty, in its wisdom, had removed Zimbabwe from the blacklist of countries that abuse their own citizens last November because it felt the situation here was improving after the violent watershed June election.
This week, Amnesty made a U-turn. Zimbabwe was once again lumped together with notoriously lawless African countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia.
But to the ordinary people in Mashonaland Central and many other provinces, even the relatively quiet period between the end of the June election and November never brought any respite from the relentless state-sanctioned terrorism.
The people's cries for help to a government that they had just elected and indeed kept in power for the past 20 years were largely ignored.
So it is in this context that it is difficult to understand Andrew Young, the visiting African-American activist and former mayor of Atlanta.
While Young, an internationally respected politician, is very right to point out that the land issue was paramount and should be resolved, there is no excuse whatsoever for him - a man who enjoys the full protection of the law in his home country the United States - to come here and proclaim that all is well.
That there is no lawlessness in Zimbabwe let alone on the farms, as he is quoted as having said.
Surely it should be obvious to a person of Young's experience that the last place he could find out about the lawlessness in Zimbabwe is the State House.
Zimbabweans are tired of international apologists for ZANU PF's current violent campaign and appeal to Young and his ilk to stop trying to legitimise state-sponsored terrorism. Enough is enough.
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