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The great media hoax
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2007-40
Monday October 8th - Sunday October 14th 2007
October 18, 2007

News this week that the state had withdrawn 'terror' charges against all but one of 26 MDC activists finally put to rest any doubt that the government-controlled media was used as the mainspring of a massive propaganda campaign earlier this year to portray the political opposition as a violent organization bent on illegally overthrowing the government.

The Herald reported that the charges had been withdrawn for lack of evidence in a small story hidden away on the inside pages of its Tuesday (9/10) edition after running scores of stories and opinion pieces over several months that conveyed a picture of the MDC as being a terrorist organisation determined to make the country ungovernable through the use of violence.

The basis for this massive publicity was provided by the authorities in the form of the arrest and detention of dozens of MDC activists following a spate of petrol-bombings in March and April immediately following the violent suppression by state security agents of an MDC-led civic rally in Highfield on March 11. More than 40 MDC officials and ordinary civilians were arrested and detained by the police during the suppression of the rally and several were brutally tortured. At least 35 MDC members arrested as a result of the petrol-bombing incidents were charged with a variety of crimes including undergoing terrorism training in South Africa, recruiting and funding insurgents, and attempted murder for petrol-bombing ZANU PF's Mbare district offices. These are the charges that have now been withdrawn for lack of evidence.

But at the time the arrests and the charges provided government officials with the "evidence" to repeatedly accuse the MDC of conducting a campaign of violence against the authorities (MDC Trying to Create Ungovernable Situation - Mumbengegwi, The Herald 17/3/07), which the government media loudly reproduced and amplified in its own feature stories and opinion columns as part of its campaign to discredit the opposition. In a number of its reports The Herald even abandoned the most basic legal principle that an individual is innocent until proven guilty by actually convicting some of those arrested before they had been tried in a court of law. Headlines such as 'MDC Bombs Women Cops', (15/3/07), 'MDC Terror Bombers to Remain in Custody', (31/3/07) and, 'MDC Terror Bombers Denied Bail', (03/4/07), are examples of this, which MMPZ reported on at the time.

They formed part of the 110 stories the government papers carried between March 13 and the end of May that attempted to portray the MDC as being responsible for "orgies of violence" around the country. Now, reportedly, only Ishmael Kauzani remains on remand facing three counts of attempted murder and one of malicious damage to property after allegedly bombing three police stations and a passenger train.

The country's only national broadcasting corporation, ZBC, also played a key role in portraying the opposition as a violent organisation, with ZTV subjecting its audiences to nearly 19 hours of coverage in its news programmes to alleged violent terrorist activities by the MDC between March and June this year. In all, ZBC stations carried 150 news stories on the topic, unquestioningly reproducing or amplifying distorted official accounts of the violence against the police, government institutions and civilians in which the MDC was implicated. Despite this unprecedented publicity however, ZBC completely ignored news of the charges against the MDC activists being withdrawn. Incredibly, only The Zimbabwean (11/10) and the online agencies NewZimbabwe.com (9/10) and Zimonline (11/10) also reported this news.

During the government media's campaign to convince the public of the MDC's "terrorist" credentials, graphic details of the crimes such as the petrol-bombing of shops, police stations, ZANU PF offices, and petrol tankers, among other targets, were repeatedly aired on ZTV's news bulletins and appeared on the front pages of the official Press.

The most used pictures used to illustrate the MDC's alleged violence included those of the two badly burnt policewomen whose house at Marimba Police Station was allegedly petrol-bombed by the MDC (The Herald 15/3) and the two police officers who were reported to have been hurt when the police broke up the court-sanctioned rally on March 11.

The Herald's front page lead announcing the arrest of 35 MDC members (29/3) under the headline 'Police nab 35 MDC activists, Confiscate Arms, Explosives' declared that "among those arrested are some suspected operatives of the (Tsvangirai) faction's self-named Democratic Resistance Committee, underground cells believed to be behind violence and bombing campaign to create panic and render Zimbabwe ungovernable." The story was accompanied by a graphic of the bombing incidents depicting an opposition activist throwing bombs, which together, clearly supported an article the previous day branding the MDC as an "anarchy-oriented party of mercenaries bent on furthering Western propaganda".

But while the government media blamed all cases of political violence in the country on the MDC and the West's alleged plans to overthrow the government, they also censored the state security agencies' own violent clampdown on the opposition. It was against this background that ZTV (28/3, 8pm), The Herald and Chronicle (29/3) passively reported a heavily armed police raid on the MDC's Harare headquarters and some opposition officials' homes, resulting in the arrest and detention of the MDC members. The assault and torture suffered by some of the prisoners while in detention was never reported.

The campaign to portray the MDC as a violent organisation also formed an important part of the ruling party's diplomatic initiative to justify its actions at the special SADC summit in Tanzania at the end of March where Zimbabwe's human rights record was due for discussion. Notably, some of the information contained in a 56-page police dossier on alleged MDC violence: A Trail of Violence, formed part of the government media's news content.

A 70-page government-sponsored supplement in the UK-based New African magazine's May issue, quoted President Mugabe justifying, and even encouraging, his government's violent crackdown on the MDC ahead of the regular SADC summit in Lusaka. The official media's offensive to portray the opposition as violent contrasted sharply with their silence on the state's withdrawal of the 'terror' charges against the MDC activists.

As a result, their audiences remained ignorant of this important news, as well as an earlier court ruling, reported in the private media, declaring that much of the evidence against the MDC accused had been fabricated.

Otherwise, The Herald's story on Tuesday reported the prosecutor trying to lend some credibility to the persecution of the MDC members by qualifying the withdrawal of the charges on the basis that the state "would proceed by way of summons if more evidence cropped up".

Because of the serious "information gap" in Zimbabwe's daily media landscape, the public have had to wait for the private media to respond to this latest news. As this report was being compiled Zimdaily (17/10) and The Financial Gazette (18/10) reported Innocent Gonese, the legal secretary in the Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC, describing the "trumped up" charges against the opposition activists as a clear indication that the ZANU PF government was a "cruel, heartless and tyrannical regime", considering that over the many weeks of their detention it had violated their rights by "denying them legal representation, access to food and medical treatment and disobeying court orders".

Gonese claimed that ZANU PF had always known the MDC members had no case to answer but they still "lied" to the SADC summit in Tanzania, to Parliament and to the Zimbabwean public that the "MDC harboured terrorists", adding that the only "act of terrorism" that took place was government's brutalization of the MDC suspects "who spent months in prison for no apparent reason".

And Zimdaily cited him challenging the government media to "give equal coverage to the withdrawal of the charges, which virtually amounts to an acquittal". But however extensively the private media report the withdrawal of the charges against the MDC, such is the domination of the government-controlled media that the enduring impression of the political opposition in the minds of the public will remain the one portrayed by these media.

MMPZ believes that the most urgent question now demanding an answer is: Who then, was responsible for the petrol-bomb attacks?

Visit the MMPZ fact sheet

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