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A brush with Mugabe's police
Steve Bloomfield, Monocle
Extracted from Issue 10, Volume 01
February 2008

Taking a photograph of an empty shelf doesn't constitute a crime in most countries. But then Zimbabwe isn't most countries. International journalists are banned: Monocle had to spend the week posing as tourists.

In a Harare supermarket a young man in jeans and a T-shirt approached Monocle's photographer Frédéric Courbet, and identified himself as a member of the Central Intelligence Organisation. He frogmarched Frédéric to the Central Police Station, but left me free to return to the hotel where I hid the journalistic evidence.

Then Monocle's fixer and I went to the police station, where it took more than two hours to find Frederic, who was being held in the Criminal Investigations Department. Despite a massive budget and unlimited manpower the authorities lack certain resources. A simple Google search would have swiftly proved that Frédéric is a photographer and I am a journalist.

Three officers came back to the hotel to search our room. They weren't thorough, and my bags went untouched. They had no evidence, but still wanted to hold Frédéric.

The senior investigating officer broke away from his colleagues and intimated he wanted to talk. For a price, he said, Frédéric could be freed tonight. We settled on US$150. As I went to hand over the money, the officer started talking. "You have to understand," he said. "Zimbabwe is a very difficult country at the moment. These people will arrest you if they see you again."

There is a divide within the police force, between the regular police and those employed by Mugabe as spies. Those secret police, said the officer, would do anything to keep him in power. "They don't like it when you come here and show the country how it is." The next morning, he said, we should leave Harare immediately and make sure no one was following us. "I know what you're doing here," he said. "Just don't put my name in your paper."

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