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No forgetting the blood on Moyo's hands
Justice Malala
August 07, 2005

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=1558003

The least of the former Zimbabwean Information minister’s crimes is blinding hypocrisy, writes Justice Malala.

" He is a vile, evil, two-faced, dissembling co-conspirator to torture, starvation and murder"

MEMORIES of injustice persist. They cannot be erased, they cannot be subjugated. They rise.

I, for example, cannot forget Gugu Moyo. No one who meets her would. Frail, serious, the young lawyer used her devastating intellect and stamina to help launch and drive an international campaign to save the Daily News in Zimbabwe.

Two years ago she travelled to South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, the UK and the US to ask governments and civil organisations to help save the newspaper after it was shut down by the government of Zimbabwe. She failed.

Moyo is not the only one I cannot forget. I cannot forget the young journalists at SW Radio Africa, forced to broadcast from London because they would be jailed in their own country. I also cannot forget Wilf Mbanga and John Masuku, journalists who have fled the same persecution in Zimbabwe.

I cannot forget the despairing faces of the hundreds of activists — many with devastating stories of torture — I have met in New York, Hillbrow, London, Pretoria and Amsterdam. All of them fled the torture and death that Jonathan Moyo — as Robert Mugabe’s Information minister — gleefully orchestrated, ruthlessly carried out and defended with a frightening robustness in public.

These memories — and those of millions of Zimbabweans and others across the world — are alive.

At a time when so many get away with murder, memory remains the most powerful weapon against a repeat of the corruption, dishonesty, cant and murder that is visited upon our fellow human beings in places like Zimbabwe. In fact, it is the only weapon we have.

Dictators and their cohorts thrive on the rewriting of history and the erasure of memory.

Jonathan Moyo writes in last week’s Sunday Times, "Mugabe has dug Zanu-PF’s grave", as though he were not complicit in the wave of torture, repression and murder that has engulfed that country in the past seven years.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, he calls Mugabe a "rhetorical nationalist who does not want to see democracy anywhere near him".

For years Moyo was the main driver of Mugabe’s attempts to throttle the legitimate voices of the Zimbabwean people — and now he wants us to forget his role in all this?

Nothing can erase from our collective memory what Moyo has done and the numerous deaths he has to be accused of causing.

We must also not forget that Moyo is not where he is today because he decided to stand up against Mugabe’s excesses. Moyo and some of his cohorts within Zanu-PF were plotting to block a Mugabe favourite from taking over the party leadership and thereby hopefully succeeding the ageing and demented dictator.

Moyo and his friends wanted themselves to sup at the table that Mugabe is luxuriating at while Zimbabweans starve.

Moyo thinks we have suddenly forgotten all this. But memory must persist, and it does in his case. We have not forgotten the Sunday Times exposé of his living it up in Johannesburg, stocking his 4x4 with luxuries, while the poor ate mud in Zimbabwe.

Let us remember the Daily News, once Zimbabwe’s biggest-selling newspaper.

The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ) points out that when legal steps to close the paper in 2000 failed, Moyo — then getting into his stride as Mugabe’s apologist — began "extra-legal" steps to shut it down.

"In April 2000 its head office was bombed. In January 2001, its printing press was bombed in a military-style operation. Hours before this attack, the Information minister [Moyo] had told the government-controlled broadcaster that the state would silence the Daily News, saying it posed a security risk to the nation," the MMPZ wrote.

Moyo went on to introduce one of the most undemocratic pieces of legislation ever passed through an African parliament, the Access to Information and Privacy Act. After its adoption, foreign journalists were kicked out of Zimbabwe, more newspapers shut down and hundreds of journalists forced into exile or jail.

When Moyo brought the legislation to parliament even his Zanu-PF colleagues thought he was bonkers. The chairman of the Parliamentary Legal Committee, Dr Eddison Zvobgo, said: "I can say without equivocation that this Bill, in its original form, was the most calculated and determined assault on our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, in the 20 years I served as Cabinet minister."

Moyo cannot fool us, must not fool us. He is a principal player in the conspiracy that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees, and he is a principal player in and accessory to the harassment, torture and murder that has become the signature of Robert Mugabe.

He is to Mugabe what Goebbels was to Hitler. While Mugabe killed, Moyo lied, whitewashed and turned the screws on independent media. Through his columns in The Herald he exhorted Zanu-PF’s militias to harass and where possible eliminate the opposition. He is a vile, evil, two-faced, dissembling co-conspirator to torture, starvation of the poor and murder.

All this we have not forgotten. These memories must stay with us for the day the International Court of Human Rights rolls into Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare and we must take the stand and testify.

And Moyo, no matter how much whitewashing of the past he attempts, will be in the dock.

*Malala is a freelance writer

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