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'After 23 years Mugabe has thrown me out, but he'll never silence me'
The Observer
May 18, 2003

The door slammed and the car screeched off at high speed. I was in the back seat, flanked by two men in plain clothes, surely agents of the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). One threw a jacket over my head and held it tightly around my neck. 'The games are now over,' said the other, thumping me on the back for emphasis. 'Now it is serious.'

I knew this procedure only too well -- the brusque abduction, the handover from police to CIO, the hood over the head, the drive to remote police stations where the victim was brutally beaten and often suffered convulsing electric shocks. I had interviewed many Zimbaweans over the past few months, including opposition members of parliament and lawyers, and heard them tell the same terrible story.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans because I did not want to let them know I was frightened. I sat up, put my shoulders back and tried to take a deep breath inside the dark shroud. 'If only we go to the airport, then I might be OK,' I told myself.

The road to Harare's airport is long, straight and well paved. My stomach lurched when we made a sharp turn to the right and slowed down, going over big humps. This was not the airport road.

'Now we are going to a special place,' said one man, and the rest chortled ominously. I began to envisage bone-crushing blows and singeing shocks. I stopped myself. I could not afford to scare myself. I had to stay strong and I would survive.

It had all happened at lightning speed. The immigration officer had served me with deportation orders and turned me over to police and security agents. As they led me away, I began telling the assembled press that the last foreign correspondent in their country was being thrown out. 'This is not the action of a government confident of its legitimacy,' I said. But with that the police surrounded me and roughly pulled me away.

'This government is afraid of a free press,' I shouted, as they tore at my jacket and knocked me off balance. 'It is afraid of critical and independent reporting,' I yelled at the top of my voice as I wrestled with five officers kicking and pushing me into the waiting car. Suddenly deportation seemed the least of the threats I faced.

It was stifling under the hood and although I could make out vague figures I could not tell where we were speeding to. After what seemed like an eternity I could feel that the car had turned back on to a tarred road and was moving again at high speed.

Straining to see through the hood, I made out a white shape arching over the road. My heart soared. It was the Independence Arch, just a few kilometres from the airport. I began breathing more normally. The car pulled up at the departure lounge and I was led away, still hooded, down corridors and into a small room in the basement of the airport. My ordeal was not over, but I had come through the worst. I was alive. It was just a matter of hours until I would be forced on a flight out of Zimbabwe, my home for 23 years.

To say I was deported is incorrect because it suggests I was ejected through some legal process. I was abducted, and it was entirely illegal -- even under President Robert Mugabe's repressive laws. The constitution spelled out my rights as the holder of a permit of permanent residence. Two orders from the High Court stated clearly that any deportation would be illegal. As I was held in the subterranean cell, my lawyer presented airport immigration officials with a judge's order to stop the deportation. Even now she is filing papers to reverse the action.

The abduction was designed to threaten and frighten. And not just me but all my colleagues in the press who write for foreign and local papers. The Mugabe government thinks that by removing me from the country in that frightening fashion it can intimidate the rest of the press. It will not silence me nor, I am certain, will it succeed in bullying Zimbabwe's courageous and committed journalists, especially those working for the foreign press and the privately owned domestic press. We all shared the same dedication to reporting on the systematic state violence, the torture, the disastrous economic decline, the trampling on basic freedoms, in the hope that our work will help to hold the Mugabe regime accountable for its actions.

My case is one small example of how the government routinely breaks its own laws. The day before I was sent off, a member of parliament for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was nabbed by CIO as he entered the House of Assembly. His whereabouts are still unknown at the time of going to press. The parliamentary elections in 2000 and the presidential elections in 2002 were both conducted with blatant illegalities. Passports are denied citizens illegally. Farms were seized and often portioned out to Mugabe's cronies illegally. The vibrant and popular privately owned press has dutifully recorded these unlawful acts. For that it has seen scores of spurious criminal charges filed against reporters and editors. Many journalists have been jailed and two tortured. The printing press of the Daily News was destroyed in a massive explosion, and despite considerable evidence police failed to turn up any suspects.

I was put in jail last year for 33 hours and later faced a long trial. I was acquitted, but then the Mugabe crew tried to deport me. A court ruling halted that last year, but on Friday the govern ment decided it would not let something as pesky as the rule of law stop it getting rid of me. I was the last foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe. All other journalists bravely writing for the overseas press are Zimbabwean citizens.

The failure of the Mugabe government is painfully obvious to all in Zimbabwe today. Poverty and hunger gnaw at the majority of people in what used to be called the breadbasket of Africa. Now Zimbabwe is seen as a basket case where more than half the 12-million people survive only thanks to international food relief. Supermarkets that used to be well stocked now have bare shelves. The staple food, maize meal, cannot be found. Bread, flour, salt, sugar, cooking oil, milk and butter are all unavailable or in short supply. Queues stretching for miles are evidence of the crippling fuel shortages. Regular blackouts of electricity are ample evidence that the government has not paid for its imported power. The newest shortage is of the country's currency. The government does not have the foreign exchange to buy ink and paper to print more of the increasingly worthless Zimbabwean dollar notes.

My Air Zimbabwe plane had to make an unscheduled stop in Malawi to get jet fuel because there was none in Zimbabwe. And the plane was lucky to get it. Air Zimbabwe already has such a bad reputation for not paying debts that many foreign airports will no longer give it credit.

Rather than accept that their policies have brought misery to the people, Mugabe and his cronies send out squads of goons, like the ones who took me away, to stamp out dissent. Stubborn and crafty Mugabe may be, but at 79 -- and in power since 1980 -- he has become fossilised and incapable of coming up with the flexible strategies, particularly new economic policies, needed to save Zimbabwe.

The collapse is gathering speed and even frightening Mugabe's former supporters. While I was held captive for 10 hours, many immigration officials, the police and even Mugabe's own secret police furtively told me they knew the action against me was illegal and wrong. Some said they knew change was coming. 'We know Mugabe must go,' said one. 'We just don't know how it is going to happen.'

At first the intention was to put me on a South African Airways flight to Johannesburg, but the airline refused after seeing my lawyer's court order stating the action was illegal. Instead I was put on a London flight of the state-owned Air Zimbabwe, which would never say no to the government. As I was led to the flight, my valiant lawyer, the feisty Beatrice Mtetwa, had somehow managed to get past two sets of guards. Immigration officers, frightened of the papers she was waving, fled their desks to avoid the confrontation between law and government. I struggled to get to her, but was pulled away and bundled on to the plane.

Now I am in London, a continent away. But Mugabe and his gang have not succeeded. The harsh light of publicity that this action throws on the government may be more damaging than any of my stories. And I remain determined to continue chronicling the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe, wherever I may be. I hope they will find me just as annoying out of the country as when I lived there.

And democratic change is coming, make no mistake. Mugabe is facing pressure from an increasingly restive population, from within his own Zanu-PF party and from the international community. Now he is also facing pressure from fellow African leaders. This month the Presidents of Africa's two most powerful countries, South Africa and Nigeria, came to Harare to press the message that Zimbabwe's mess is a problem for all of Africa. They pushed Mugabe to begin negotiations with the opposition. Such talks are the first step towards a transition that will take Zimbabwe back to democracy and, eventually, prosperity.

But it is a long road ahead and the action against me is a classic case of shooting, or rather deporting, the messenger because the government does not like the truth -- that things are not working in Zimbabwe and change is waiting right around the corner.

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