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Human rights abuses and the attack on Stevenson
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-27
Monday July 3rd 2006 - Sunday July 9th 2006

THIS week the government media milked dry the attack on five officials from the Arthur Mutambara-led MDC by suspected members of the rival faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai to reinforce the authorities’ propaganda that the opposition party is the architect of political violence in the country.

For example, despite having ignored the attack itself, ZBH carried four follow-up stories that mainly quoted ZANU PF officials vilifying the Tsvangirai-led MDC faction as violent.

In one of the stories, Radio Zimbabwe (5/7,1pm) quoted ZANU PF spokesman Nathan Shamuyarira claiming that the incident showed that the MDC was violent and undemocratic, adding that some ruling party activists have also been assaulted by opposition members in the past. He did not provide any evidence nor was he asked to.

Likewise, the official papers carried 17 reports on the incident - at least five of them on the front page- that were mainly used to remind their audiences of how violent the Tsvangirai-led MDC faction was. To buttress this notion, they cited no less than 10 times a previous report compiled by rival MDC MP David Coltart accusing the Tsvangirai group of being violent, a trait he said had partly triggered the split in the opposition. They also repeatedly referred to at least three past cases in which the group had been implicated in violent activities.

In fact, in total disregard for basic reporting standards, the government media tried and convicted the Tsvangirai-led faction over the beatings, which they invariably described as "savage", "brutal" and "barbaric", before the courts had even heard the case.

Notably, while the official media feasted on the alleged violent nature of the Tsvangirai-led MDC, they censored human rights violations allegedly committed by the police against the MDC, civic activists and members of the public, reported in the private media during the week.

In addition, they would not reconcile their accusations of the MDC as a violent party with results of a study (The Standard 2/7) by the Zimbabwe Torture Victims Project attributing 99 percent of Zimbabwe’s political violence to the ruling party and state security agents. It supported an earlier report from the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, whose findings overwhelmingly attributed political violence to law enforcement agencies and ruling party activists, based on actual incidents that had been brought to court. The MDC were responsible for only a tiny fraction of the violence cases recorded.

Instead, the government media simply restricted their coverage to comments from the ruling party and other opposition parties, which crucified the Tsvangirai faction for the country’s violent political environment.

It was not surprising therefore that the official papers’ sourcing heavily favoured the Mutambara faction whose leaders were quoted accusing their rivals for beating up their members. See Fig 1.

Fig. 1 Voice Distribution in the public Press

Although ZBH sought comment from the Tsvangirai-led faction as shown in Fig 2, their comments were drowned in the accusatory tone of the stories.

Fig 2 Voice distribution on ZBH

While the private media condemned the attack in the 18 stories they carried on the incident, they also questioned the moral ground on which ZANU PF justified its accusation of the Tsvangirai faction. For example, The Financial Gazette, criticised the ruling party for using the assaults to "adopt a holier-than thou attitude that it can use to further clamp down on the MDC", while the Independent’s Muckraker questioned what the ruling party had done to curb political violence, which it had institutionalised.

And contrary to the official media’s claims that NGOs had remained silent on the matter, these media quoted the Human Rights NGO Forum, a grouping of human rights defenders, the Canadian Embassy and the Civic Education Trust all condemning the attack.

However, The Daily Mirror (6/7) questioned Canada’s interests in condemning the attack but failed to explain what they found uncharacteristic about the disapproval of Canada’s stance on political violence.

Besides, the private media carried six fresh incidents of rights violations during the week. These included the arrest and harassment of civic activists, opposition supporters, street vendors and the barring of MDC gatherings by the police, who justified their actions on the grounds that they were merely enforcing the Public Order and Security Act, which is recognized internationally as a severely repressive law that undermined basic human rights and all manner of civil liberties.

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