Trudy Stevenson is by no means the first Member of Parliament from Zimbabwe's opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (mdc), to suffer political violence. Stevenson and four colleagues were leaving a political gathering outside Harare earlier this month when, they say, they were attacked by about 40 youths wielding sticks, stones and a machete. "I knew they wanted to kill me," Stevenson later told a London Times reporter from her hospital bed, while recovering

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) from head injuries, a broken arm and multiple bruises. "They kept hitting my head with rocks. I could feel the blood running down my neck."

Normally in Zimbabwe, such violence is blamed on supporters of President Robert Mugabe. But Stevenson insists that she recognized some of her assailants as belonging to a rival faction of her own mdc party. The incident has added an ugly new dimension to the infighting that has lately plagued the opposition, perhaps weakening it to the point of collapse. Stevenson is one of several high-ranking party officials who broke ties with founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai late last year, citing autocratic leanings and a growing tendency for violence by his supporters.

Tsvangirai promptly condemned the attack on Stevenson, and promised to expel anyone found to be responsible. His detractors in the mdc and Mugabe's ruling zanu-pf party both seized on the incident to claim he has brutal ambitions. Stevenson said she was attacked because she had been working in an area known to be a Tsvangirai stronghold.

But Roy Bennett, a former M.P. with close ties to Tsvangirai who is currently trying to seek asylum in South Africa gave a different explanation. He told Time that members of zanu-pf had infiltrated the mdc and orchestrated both the attack on Stevenson and the split within the party in order to undermine the opposition. "We believe they orchestrated the attack on Trudy to make it look like it was us," he said. Bennett said that the mdc had launched an independent investigation into the attack, and remained committed to resolving differences within the party peacefully.

Even so, to some observers the incident suggests how the mdc, which has renounced violence, has been corroded by Mugabe's rule. "The attack confirms that all Zimbabweans are victims of a political culture of violence," says University of Zimbabwe political scientist John Makumbe. "This should be a wake-up call for both factions. We are now eating each other instead of focusing on the real crisis in this country."

With zanu-pf itself riven by political infighting and economic meltdown, and some analysts predicting that Mugabe's rule will collapse before the end of the year, the turmoil within the mdc raises further questions about Zimbabwe's prospects for future stability. "I hope the two sides will come back together in the end, but in the short term I don't see that happening," says journalist Andrew Meldrum, author of a recent memoir on Zimbabwe. "At this point it's the Zimbabwean people who are the losers, because they are looking for an effective opposition against Robert Mugabe, and they don't have that."

• MEGAN LINDOW
• Attack on MDC MP betrays growing internal tensions