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Media
repression in Zimbabwe
Henning
Melber, Pambazuka.org
July 23, 2004
www.pambazuka.org
Participants in the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Seminar on "Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press", held
in Windhoek, Namibia, from 29 April to 3 May 1991, declared: "Consistent
with article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment,
maintenance and fostering of an independent, pluralistic and free press
is essential to the development and maintenance of democracy in a nation
and for economic development."
This "Windhoek Declaration" marked a highlight in the so-called second
wave (of democratisation) on the continent. Ironically, it was also at
Windhoek - almost thirteen years later (end of February 2004) - when Zimbabwe's
Minister of State for Information and Publicity signed a co-operation
agreement with his Namibian counterpart on closer collaboration, including
a planned joint weekly newspaper on regional issues.
In an in-depth interview offered to the local state-funded newspaper "New
Era" (5 March 2004), he praised the Presidents of both countries "as two
leaders that have remained steadfast, committed, not only as nationalists
but also as Pan-Africanists, and as global leaders". He urged both countries
to pursue the common task of "doing justice to the kind of solidarity
that was born during the liberation struggle, and which must be upheld
today and in future".
He further identified the following common challenges: "We are here to
cement these historic bonds and ties, and look at the new challenges that
we are facing, as we in particular begin to consolidate the economic objectives
of our liberation struggle, and identifying the critical role of information,
information not only in terms of the press, the print media, but also
the electronic media and other multimedia platforms that are new, that
are being used and that are accessible to these generations that may be
prone to losing the bigger picture of the essential story."
The Honourable Minister was not always using such language. As a Zimbabwean
scholar still abroad he stated at a Conference on Robben Island as late
as February 1999 that "it would be a mistake to justify the struggles
for national liberation purely on the basis of the need to remove the
white minority regimes from power and to replace them with black majority
regimes that did not respect or subscribe to fundamental principles of
democracy and human rights (…) ruling personalities have hijacked the
movement and are doing totally unacceptable things in the name of national
liberation. Being here at Robben Island for the first time, I am immensely
pained by the fact that some people who suffered here left this place
only to turn their whole countries into Robben Islands."
Only three years later, in March 2002, he - now in a ministerial rank
- praised the results of the Presidential elections in his country as
an impressive sign "that Zimbabweans have come of age that they do not
believe in change from something to nothing. They do not believe in moving
from independence and sovereignty to new colonialism, they do not believe
in the discourse of human rights to deepen inequality."
Rhetoric of such calibre has earned Jonathan Moyo the label 'Goebbels
of Africa'. This is certainly too demagogic itself, given the historically
unique dimensions of German holocaust to which the Nazi propaganda minister
relates and associates with. But name calling of this kind documents the
degree of polarisation and level of dissent in the Zimbabwean society
today. The current clamp down on the independent media in Zimbabwe is
certainly neither exclusively nor decisively the result of a personal
vendetta by a previously progressive scholar.
Jonathan Moyo is just one - though admittedly due to his track record
notably exotic - example of relatively high profile calibre representatives
of a post-colonial establishment seeking own gains by populist rhetoric
covering up their selfish motives. They have become part and parcel of
a set of deep-rooted anachronistic values within a system of liberation
movements in power. After seizing legitimate political control over the
state, these turned their liberation politics under the disguise of pseudo-revolutionary
slogans into oppressive tools. Their "talk left, act right" seeks to cover
the true motive to consolidate the occupied political commanding heights
of society against all odds preferably forever - at the expense of the
public interest they claim to represent in the light of deteriorating
socio-economic conditions of living for the once colonised and now hardly
liberated (and even less emancipated) majority.
Sadly enough, it was the same Jonathan Moyo, who at an early stage of
the sobering post-colonial realities in Zimbabwe offered courageous and
sensible analytical insights into these processes. While being a Lecturer
at the Department of Political and Administrative Studies of the University
of Zimbabwe, he presented thought provoking and painful reflections on
the liberation war (chimurenga) with all its dubious ambiguity.
Read this from a paper in late 1992: "There can hardly be any doubt that
the armed struggle in Zimbabwe was a pivotal means to the goal of defeating
oppressive and intransigent elements of colonialism and racism. However,
as it often is the case with protracted social processes of a conflict
with two sides, the armed struggle in this country had a deep socio-psychological
impact on its targets as well as on its perpetrators. (…) For the most
part, the armed struggle in this country lacked a guiding moral ethic
beyond the savagery of primitive war and was thus amenable to manipulation
by the violence of unscrupulous nationalist politicians and military commanders
who personalized the liberation war for their own selfish ends. (…) This
resulted in a culture of fear driven by values of violence perpetrated
in the name of nationalism and socialism."
Nowadays, the erstwhile critical scholar represents the same mindset he
had questioned. According to a news report by the Media Institute of Southern
Africa (MISA), he used a press conference on 30 April 2004 in Bulawayo
to threaten, "there was enough space in Zimbabwe's prisons for journalists
caught dealing with foreign media houses". As "terrorists of the pen"
they would be targeted next. The report quotes the Minister as saying:
"President Mugabe has said our main enemy is the financial sector but
the enemy is media who use the pen to lie about this country. Such reporters
are terrorists and the position on how to deal with terrorists is to subject
them to the laws of Zimbabwe." This is tantamount to paranoia and indicative
for the recent efforts to censor even private communication.
As the mere distribution of and access to information can be damaging
to the security interest of those represented by the Minister, the next
onslaught is directed against the private ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
The state owned telephone-company announced early June 2004 that ISPs
had to enter new contracts stipulating that they as service providers
prevent or report to the authorities anti-national activities and malicious
correspondence via their telephone lines. If they fail to do so, they
will be liable, i.e. penalised.
This follows earlier appalling interferences resulting in the closing
of independent newspapers and the imprisonment or expelling of journalists
on a systematic scale. The government and its executive branches are eager
to emphasise that this repression is in compliance with the existing (and
for such purposes enacted) laws and hence fully within "legality" (which,
of course, is a far cry from legitimacy). This simply shows that the "rule
of law" can apply in the absence of any justice. It is the strategy of
the ban that constitutes the rule of law. It does not even spare government
friendly media productions and displays the intolerant, all-controlling
nature of the system.
One prominent example is the banning of the live broadcasted television
production "Talk to the Nation" in mid-2001, which was sponsored by the
National Development Association (NDA). The explanatory statement by an
official of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) is a remarkable
example for the "innocence" of a totalitarian mindset: "Live productions
can be tricky and dangerous. The setting of the NDA productions was professionally
done but maybe the production should not have been broadcast live. You
do not know what someone will come and say and there is no way of controlling
it."
Along such an understanding, media operating independently or beyond direct
control of government were increasingly hampered and closed down, as the
prominent example of the Daily News showed. On an alleged breach of a
legal clause under the notorious Access to Information and Protection
of Privacy Act (AIPPA), the Media and Information Commission (MIC) has
now in June 2004 closed The Tribune for at least one year. Its publisher,
himself a former ZANU-PF MP, was reportedly suspended earlier on by the
ruling party for "disrespecting" ZANU-PF top structures as he had denounced
AIPPA in his maiden address to parliament.
It therefore does not come as a surprise that the latest annual overview
on the state of media freedom in the Southern African region by the Media
Institute of Southern Africa - issued on the World Press Freedom Day (26
April) - records more than half of all 188 media freedom and freedom of
expression violations in 2003 among the ten monitored countries in Zimbabwe
alone.
International agencies committed to the freedom of press and the professional
ethics of independent journalism are in agreement that the situation in
Zimbabwe is intolerable. It prompted the Annual General Assembly of the
International Press Institute (IPI) on 18 May 2004 in Warsaw to adopt
the unanimous decision "to retain Zimbabwe's name on the 'watchlist' of
nations that are seriously eroding media freedom". And the Board of the
World Association of Newspapers (WAN) condemned at its 57th World Newspaper
Congress in Istanbul early June 2004 the "attempts to silence independent
media". At a meeting in Windhoek during early June 2004 a total of 24
newspaper editors from eight countries in Southern Africa organised in
The Council of the Southern African Editors' Forum (SAEF) suspended its
Zimbabwean wing.
The narrowing down of the post-colonial discourse to a mystification of
the liberation movement in power as the exclusive home to national identity
and belonging finds a corresponding expression in the increased monopolisation
of the public sphere and expressed opinion.
Amanda Hammer and Brian Raftopoulos, co-editors of a recent volume on
"Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business" summarised this in their introduction
as "efforts to control or destroy the independent media and to silence
all alternative versions of history and the present, whether expressed
in schools, in churches, on sports fields, in food and fuel queues, at
trade union or rate payers' meetings, in opposition party offices or at
foreign embassies."
Such desperate initiatives to enhance control signal at the same time
a lack of true support among the population, who otherwise could be allowed
to speak out freely. The repression of public opinion beyond the official
government propaganda is therefore an indication of the ruthless last
fight for survival of a regime, which has lost its original credibility
and legitimacy to an extent that it has to be afraid of allowing a basic
and fundamental principle of human rights - the freedom of expression.
* Dr Henning Melber is Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute
in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of The Namibian Economic Policy
Research Unit (NEPRU) between 1992 and 2000. Before studying Political
Science and Sociology he was trained as journalist (1971/72) and sacked
from the local German newspaper in Windhoek (1972) for disputes over political
and professional-ethical reasons. He joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974.
This is the shortened introduction to the forthcoming "Media, Public Discourse
and Political Contestation in Zimbabwe", published in the "Current African
Issues" series with The Nordic Africa Institute.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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