The Zimbabwe Situation

On April 1, 2007, I was captured by the police and dragged to the Harare Central Police Station’s notorious Law and Order section.

I was pushed into a stuffy room and ordered to sit on a dirty, green carpet. Behind the desk was a lick-spittle man – tall, dark, thin and stern-faced. On the neat Mahogany desk was a plaque inscribed with the police superintendent’s name.

Wearing a dull coloured Nelson Mandela shirt buttoned up to the top-most fastener and putting on thick-rimmed spectacles, the superintendent took a contemptuous glance at me and remarked, “Ah, he is a kid.”

“Sell-out,” he roared at me. “Why are you selling out your motherland to imperialists?” he barked, asking further why I was writing “lies in your newspaper.”

In the previous edition of The Zimbabwean – a newspaper printed in South Africa and carted into the country across the border every Thursday – we had started a “Name and Shame” column, where we exposed the names of top police officers who had savagely beaten up then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai – now the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe – in police custody. And this particular superintendent was one of the officers we had named. And he savoured the moment, reminding me that he headed the “brutal” Law and Order unit.

The superintendent personally tied me up in cuffs and leg irons; and with almost a dozen other people, badly beat me up, interspersing the beatings with a meticulous recording of answers to the questions that they would have barked at me.

The questions were about my employer, The Zimbabwean – a newspaper which they alleged was attempting to oust President Mugabe and install a puppet regime led by Tsvangirai. It was of course all nonsense. They wanted to know my sources, and this was one thing that precipitated the beatings. I refused to give any names and they scaled up the beatings in a bid to extract a confession.

Prior to this, there had been concerted efforts to silence the newspaper, then the only independent daily in the country. Government had tried everything, from imposing a punitive import duty on the paper, in an apparent bid to limit its circulation and now this.

Earlier, a truck carrying a consignment of 60,000 copies of The Zimbabwean had been seized by gunman – believed to be members of the feared Military Intelligence – and destroyed. The South African driver of the delivery truck was gruesomely beaten up and the whole consignment of newspapers doused with petrol and shot at using AK-47 rifles. The whole truck went up in flames, and all the papers.

And as the Zimbabwe-based chief reporter of the The Zimbabwean, I became the regime’s new target.

The beatings were sadistic. Bloodied and pleading that the beatings stop, the superintendent assigned a delegation of plain clothes detectives to go and search my house. In leg-irons, they took me home and turned the place upside down, charging I had bought my property using “filthy lucre.” They seized my computer and other memory storage devices, and dragged me back to the police station.

For the next five days, I endured interrogations by different cops, including members of the feared secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation. They used all tactics, from “bad cop, good cop” strategies to outright violence whenever I refused to cooperate.

After the long day, I would be taken back to a dinghy and filthy police cell reeking of urine and other human waste. For five days I endured this mental and physical torture. On the second day, the High Court issued an order to the cops to present me before a court of law. That order was contemptuously defied.

On the third day, the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights – representing me on a pro bono basis – applied for another release order and again it was duly granted. But then, it was defied again by the police. In fact, the court order was torn to pieces as soon as it was handed to the superintendent.

Then on day four, a final order was granted by the High Court, this time instructing the cops that they will be charged with contempt of court if they failed to produce me in court of law by 10 am the following day. They had no choice.

Badly beaten, I limped into court on April 5, where the superintendent told the prosecutor that he must oppose bail on the grounds that I was a “flight risk.” He speculated that as soon as I was granted bail, I would immediately skip the border to neighbouring South Africa and run to my “handlers.”

In court, I was represented by gritty Harare lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa – a leading Zimbabwean media rights lawyer who was won international acclaim for her work. Back in the court room, magistrate Gloria Takundwa – a young-fresh-out-of-university magistrate – immediately demanded answers from the prosecution team why I was in such a battered state.

Mtetwa told the magistrate that the case cannot proceed to trial until police explain why they had to savagely beat me up in custody. The prosecution team promised to present a report at the next court sitting.

Magistrate Takundwa excoriated the police for “high-handedness” and granted me bail and advised that I be taken into hospital right away. I was granted $100 bail. I heaved a sigh of relief, but I was in excruciating pain. I was taken to the Counselling Services Unit (CSU), a Harare-based legal clinic and NGO that keeps medical records of victims of State torture.

They meticulously recorded everything that happened. (Three months ago, police raided the legal clinic and confiscated all the medical records at the clinic and detained staff who were later freed on bail.)

Back to April 5, 2007, I was checked into Dandaro Clinic, a private hospital in Harare, by the CSU, where I spent over a month nursing soft-tissue injuries, and a broken finger. When the trial opened, I was charged with publishing false news. My defence lawyer Mtetwa shredded the State case in court, and I was acquitted.

Six years on, the status of press freedom is more or less the same. When will we be safe to speak?

To mark the 20th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, 2013, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office aims to “shine a light” to highlight repression of the media and freedom of expression using personal testimonies and other accounts from around the world.

For more information on our activities on freedom of expression, and human rights more broadly, read our 2012 annual human rights report.

The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), or its policies.

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Case study: Zimbabwe