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Zimbabwe's worsening human rights situation
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Media Update 2007-1
December 18th 2006 - Sunday January 14th 2007
January, 2007

THE country's worsening human rights situation continued to dominate the limelight during the Christmas holidays and the beginning of the New Year. The media carried 36 stories on the subject (between December 18th and January 14th) of which 12 were new incidents and the rest were follow-up reports.

The 12 included stripping publisher Trevor Ncube of his citizenship; the detention and victimisation of opposition party officials and supporters; an attack on civic activists, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians by the police.

Although the official media carried some of the stories they reported them passively, treating them as normal developments.

For example, The Herald (30/12) merely announced that Ncube was contesting the authorities' decision to strip him of his Zimbabwean citizenship on the basis that his father was born in Zambia. It quoted Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede defending his actions saying Ncube had allegedly failed to "renounce (his) Zambian citizenship by descent within the prescribed period (July 6 2001 to January 6 2002)" as required under the country's tyrannical citizenship laws.

No attempt was made to discuss the implications of this development on the future of his publications, the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard.

Instead, ZBC (4/1, 8pm) and The Herald (5/1) reported the Media and Information Commission dismissing online agencies' reports arguing that the move could be part of government's plans to shut down his papers, which are among the few alternative sources of information still available to the public.

Apart from falsely claiming that such reports emanated from Ncube's weeklies, the commission misled the public into believing that under AIPPA the matter was inconsequential to his ownership of the two papers. It claimed that the law permitted Ncube to "maintain his ownership" of the papers "as long as he was regarded as permanently resident in Zimbabwe".

The official media allowed such deceptive claims to pass without scrutiny therefore misleading the public into believing that there was no threat to his newspaper group. For example, they did not clarify the crucial issue of whether stripping Ncube of his citizenship automatically provided him with permanent residency status. MMPZ has not studied the law under which Ncube lost his citizenship, but it is most unlikely that it provides for automatic permanent residency and therefore the act of depriving Ncube of his Zimbabwean citizenship would still have implications for his shareholding in the Independent newspaper group.

Similarly, The Herald passively reported on the arrest (18/12) and the release on bail eight days later (22/12) of MDC MP Paul Madzore on public violence charges without interpreting the matter as indicative of the authorities' unrelenting assault on civil liberties.

Neither did the paper, nor indeed, any government media, condemn the shooting to death of civilians by police, nor the arson attack on civic activist Lovemore Madhuku's house.

As has become the norm, it was only the private media, especially the niche market private radio stations and online agencies that reported these violations in the context of them being indications of a paranoid and intolerant police state.

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