While Mr Mugabe enjoys himself in Paris, nemesis awaits him at home

With World Cup cricketers due to visit and an invitation to a summit in Paris, things are looking up for Robert Mugabe. Just when he seemed so all alone, even his old chum Gaddafi was cutting off the oil supplies, the Zimbabwean leader has been thrown some lifelines. The sportsmen might wish they were going elsewhere but their managers have been hammering home the message that they are "contractually obliged" to go to Zimbabwe.

The president of France has no contractual difficulties. He is simply engaging in the ancient Gallic custom of winding up the English. Africa hands call this the "Fashoda Syndrome", a hark back to the bitter struggle between France and Britain over colonial Africa. But how much do the cricketers or Mr Chirac know about the reality of life in Zimbabwe? Mr Chirac has an embassy and intelligence officers in the country. One presumes he must not be altogether ignorant. The cricketers have access to newspapers and television. The internet will supply them with any amount of information about the excesses of the Zimbabwean police.

But to help them to appreciate just what and whom they are dealing with, let me offer this story from Zimbabwe. I met the victims myself in Harare earlier this week. The member of parliament knew the police wanted to arrest him. So he called his lawyer and arranged a meeting at a city hotel. The MP, Job Sekhala, is a member of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's main opposition party. Sekhala is charismatic and he is tough. He reminds me of one of those young activists from the great uprising against apartheid during the 1980s in South Africa.

The lawyer whom he went to the hotel to meet is called Gabriel Shumba, a graduate of the respected University of Pretoria. For some years now he has been representing the victims of human rights abuses. In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, these are many and varied: opposition politicians, journalists, human rights campaigners, medical doctors, ordinary citizens who have, in one way or another, fallen foul of the police. Gabriel Shumba is a studious-looking, intense young man. Avoiding the bar and the lobby for fear of police spies, the member of parliament, his lawyer, and two friends went to an upstairs room. The consultation did not last long. A spy reported their presence and the police arrived and all four men were taken into custody.

Forgive me if we deviate and consider a method of torture favoured by the police, and greatly feared by those who are unlucky enough to fall into their custody.

You take a man, or woman. Strip them naked. Taunt and humiliate them. Beat them first, but not too heavily because the last thing you want are bruises and cuts that might be used to decorate the front page of a newspaper. You then throw them to the ground, or tie them to a table. Then attach wires to their feet, to their genitals, to their rectum, to their tongues... and then switch on the power. Let me now quote from a report prepared by Amnesty International: "The immediate effects of electric shock treatment varies from individual to individual and depend on how the torture is inflicted, but include severe pain, loss of muscle control, nauseous feelings, convulsions, fainting, and involuntary defecation and urination."

Job Sekhala and Gabriel Shumba and their two friends would all endure this torture. They were taken individually to the torture centre. Sekhala remembers a hood being placed over his head and being led down several flights of stairs to a basement room. They beat him, stripped him and electrocuted him. He wet himself, and he was forced to roll on the floor in his own urine. Clean it up, he was told. Later he remembers a bitter liquid in his mouth. This was probably adrenalin, exploding into his system with the electric shocks.

Gabriel Shumba, the human rights lawyer, was told, as they attached the wires to his tongue: "This is the tongue you use to defend human rights." The volts blasted into his body. Naked and terrified he jolted as the electricity coursed through flesh and bone. His brain erupted with noise and light. Shumba had entered the world inhabited by his clients. No law degree could protect him here.

One of the other men, receiving the same treatment, passed out. On coming to he saw his small son standing, looking at him. The child was asking him to come away. It was time go to home. But the man was hallucinating. For when his vision cleared he saw only the figures of his torturers. One of them was a woman. She would beat and taunt him while the male police officers held him down. Not that there was much chance of resistance. In the torture chambers of Robert Mugabe's Central Intelligence Organisation there is no route of escape.

Yet Zimbabwe's head of state has been invited to attend a summit in Paris next month. Mr Mugabe will enjoy this trip. He likes foreign travel and the finer things in life; he recently enjoyed an extended break in Malaysia though EU "smart sanctions" have inhibited his movements in Europe. His wife Grace will enjoy the Paris shopping, much as the country's minister of information, Jonathan Moyo, indulged himself in the supermarkets of Johannesburg recently. The man responsible for world's most repressive media legislation filled several cars with goodies and then drove back to Zimbabwe, where seven million people are in danger of starvation.

But one doesn't blame Mr Mugabe or his mouthpiece Jonathan Moyo for taking any chance they can get to escape the gloomy vista at home. Even as he sweeps along the streets in his motorcade, the president of Zimbabwe will see the long petrol queues and the lines of people waiting for food.

We know that Mr Mugabe blames everybody but himself for the economic collapse of his country. But his problem is that the people blame him. Whatever favours the cricket visit will do him, and however much he is flattered to be invited to Paris, Robert Mugabe knows as well as any other Zimbabwean that change is coming.

Only last week the head of the army admitted the country was in a crisis which demanded national unity – for that, read possibly a government of national unity that would include the opposition but not have Mugabe at its head. The price of such change will probably be an amnesty for Mr Mugabe and his henchmen. If such a device was used to let apartheid's architects off the hook, why not use it in Zimbabwe, especially if the alternative is a steady descent into economic ruin and violence?

But the South African example will work only if it also follows the principle of public disclosure: for Zimbabwe to heal, the truth of the tortures chambers, the full story of the Matabeleland massacres must be told. The killers must say what they did and who gave the orders, and they must face the victims. All of this is some way off. First must come the negotiations. And if they don't begin soon Mr Mugabe may come to see this period as the greatest lost opportunity of his long career.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent