Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday October 6th – Sunday October 12th 2003
Weekly Media Update 2003-40

CONTENTS:

1. GENERAL COMMENT
2. PANEL BEATING IMAGE
3. HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

1. General Comment

The government controlled media’s monopoly of daily news output since the banning of The Daily News was again highlighted this week by the superficial and distorted nature of its coverage of the police crackdown on labour protests and the illegal detention of the South African High Commissioner to Zimbabwe by new farmers.

Zimbabweans no longer have any mass circulating daily alternative source of information and therefore cannot so easily assess the truth of events as reported in the government media.

But it needs no comparison to state that the accounts of both incidents in The Herald and on ZBC reflected only official opinion and reported vaguely on the two events. For example, the two media organizations played down the demonstrations by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, echoing police opinion that it was a “non-event”, virtually ignoring its nationwide nature and the brutality of the police. There was no accurate figure given to the number of arrests and no effort was made to obtain comment from the ZCTU. Needless to say, the subsequent threat to blockade Zimbabwe by the South African trade union movement if the arrested union leaders were not released was completely ignored. Such were the omissions and evasions by the government media that their coverage of the demos cannot be described as a journalistic exercise and gravely misinformed their audiences.
Only those with the privilege to access the private and international media (particularly SW Radio Africa and Studio 7) were able to obtain accounts closer to reality.

The public remained equally uninformed about the circumstances surrounding the detention of the South African High Commissioner, Jeremiah Ndou, by resettled farmers at a farm in Mashonaland West. The government-controlled media gave thin information on the issue and even tried to justify this lawless behaviour, which has characterised the land reform programme since farm invasions began three years ago.

In fact, ZBC distracted the attention of its audiences from such issues by bombarding them with excessive coverage of the Zimbabwe national soccer team’s preparations for their 2006 World Cup preliminary qualifying match against soccer lightweights Mauritania. For example, the government-controlled ZTV devoted about 52 minutes to soccer, or 40 percent of the total airtime allocated to 8pm bulletins (excluding arts, business, weather and, notably, sport segments) aired from October 7th to the 12th. The trend was similar on Radio Zimbabwe which carried 40 soccer related news items or 34 percent of the total number of news items monitored in the same period.

Such manipulation of a popular sport at the expense of other important news constitutes an abuse of the public broadcaster’s mandate and violates the public’s right to be informed. This sort of news coverage highlights the need for alternative sources of information and demonstrates how far Zimbabwe is from being a democratic society.

2. Panel beating the national image

The Commonwealth summit in Abuja, Nigeria in December has seemingly re-invigorated the international community’s interest in Zimbabwe. This was largely captured in the private media, whose reports revealed that the international community remained unimpressed with the governance of Zimbabwe and was calling for more pressure on the country’s leadership to force it to conform to basic democratic principles.

The government-controlled media overwhelmed such reports with their own characteristic rhetoric. Typical of this was the argument that Zimbabwe’s isolation would soon end because nations such as Italy and other EU and developing countries were at last beginning to realize that Britain was the main cause of its isolation. They thus superficially presented Zimbabwe as a victim of racial bigotry emanating from the White Commonwealth, particularly the Club’s secretary-general, Don McKinnon, whom they claimed was against the land reform programme.

In fact, SW Radio Africa (6/10) revealed government’s obsession with the notion that McKinnon was a major stumbling block to its readmission into the Commonwealth that it was rallying other Club members to reject his re-election bid when his term of office expires in December because of his alleged bias against Zimbabwe’s leadership. The station, quoting the London based Times, reported: “Zimbabwe and its allies have been working to have him replaced after his intervention earlier this year which led to Zimbabwe’s one-year suspension from the Commonwealth.”
The report added that Zimbabwe and its friends wanted to replace McKinnon with an Asian. A similar story under a misleading headline, McKinnon to be ousted at CHOGM, appeared in the Chronicle (7/10) the following day. The headline gave the impression that McKinnon was to be fired for allegedly demonizing Zimbabwe when in fact his term of office simply expires. Even the article itself highlighted this.

While the paper gave the impression that Zimbabwe’s campaign to have McKinnon ousted would succeed, The Zimbabwe Independent (10/10) gave an alternative view. The paper quoted New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff confirming that President Mugabe was leading a plan to oust McKinnon, but said, “There was no sign of support from other Commonwealth nations…I doubt that even were a candidate to emerge that they would have much credibility, being seen as the Mugabe candidate.”

Goff was quoted in another story in the paper saying that if Mugabe were invited to the summit, the Queen and the
Prime Ministers of Australia, Britain and New Zealand would not attend. According to Goff, Zimbabwe’s failure to abide by the Commonwealth’s key principles threatened “the glue that holds the Commonwealth together.” However, the paper failed to observe that such an opinion could be used to support Zimbabwe’s otherwise hysterical allegations that the country was a victim of British-manipulated racial vindictiveness. And the government media found plenty of evidence for this.

For example, The Herald and Chronicle (7/10) glowingly reported that Britain had failed to host the 110th International Parliamentary Union assembly next year because the union’s governing council voted against its decision to exclude Zimbabwe. According to the reports, which heavily relied on Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, all African and Caribbean countries, except Botswana, Canada, France and Belgium, among others, voted in support of Zimbabwe’s participation at next year’s meeting.

The papers’ obsession with tinting everything with racial bigotry also manifested itself in the way they derided Botswana for exercising its democratic right by voting alongside Britain. They alleged: “Botswana’s three representatives were reportedly jeered by fellow African countries and had to leave the assembly building in a huff, embarrassed by the outcome of the vote”. Chinamasa then claimed that, “the results showed the understanding by most countries of the correctness of the country’s position against that of Britain.” The comments of Italy’s Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Guiseppe Marchini Gamia, also came in handy in the government-controlled media’s efforts to circumvent Zimbabwe’s continued international isolation by presenting it as a bilateral matter between Italy and Britain. ZBC (8/10, 8pm) and The Herald (9/10) quoted Gamia as having said his country, which is the current chair of the EU, “would support all efforts aimed at opening dialogue with Zimbabwe”.

The fact that Gamia had primarily gone to Vice-President Joseph Msika to complain about the continued illegal occupation of properties owned by Italian nationals, some under government-to-government agreement, was given less prominence.
The Herald report quoted Msika criticising Italy for being coerced by Britain “to join the bandwagon of other EU countries to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe”. Taking a leaf from Msika, the Chronicle (10/10) observed: “The new European Union chair (Italy) is faced with a challenge of setting not just one record straight but several, since London has tried in the past to influence Brussels and even the French to ditch Zimbabwe.”

While the government-controlled media were at pains to convince its audiences that the international community was softening its stance towards Zimbabwe, The Financial Gazette (9/10) and The Business Tribune (9/10) revealed that their perception about the country was, in fact, worsening. In front-page articles the papers reported that according to Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2003, Zimbabwe was now ranked as the third most corrupt country in the region and 106th out of 133 countries surveyed worldwide. The Sunday Mirror (12/10) also reported this. The Financial Gazette quoted TI as saying perceptions about a country are formed by “matters relating to political and civic participation, media operating environment, access to information, judicial independence (which is crucial to the enforcement of all rights and particularly property rights)”.

The Zimbabwe Independent (10/10) revealed that the international community’s displeasure with Mugabe was affecting food aid the country desperately needs for over five million hungry people. The paper reported that only the US, EU and Australia had donated a combined US$73 million of the US$308 million needed to feed people threatened by starvation because of “disgust with President Robert Mugabe’s government”. In fact, the paper also noted that Mugabe presented the findings of the latest Land Audit Report, which has yet to be made public locally, to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan “in a bid to convince the international community that reorganisation would take place on the farms to correct errors in the fast track land reform programme”.

However, the same paper (and Studio 7 & SW Radio Africa (9/10) also reported that Canada’s three largest political parties wanted President Mugabe tried for crimes against humanity. Studio 7 quoted Canadian MP Keith Martin as saying the call for indictment was as a result of a “state sponsored programme of murder, torture, violence, intimidation and an effort … to starve a good part of the Zimbabwean population to death, all instigated by Mugabe and his cronies”.
The government-controlled media ignored this development.

3. Human rights abuses

After closing The Daily News under the guise of upholding the rule of law, the government proved it still had not outgrown its violent nature in suppressing dissent when the police crushed the ZCTU labour demonstrations against the country’s economic chaos. The labour body was also protesting against the continued violations of human rights.

Although all media reported on the issue, it was only through The Financial Gazette (9/10), Studio 7, SW Radio Africa and the international media (9/10) that the public got to know of the alleged police brutality in crushing the protests. They reported that about 200 people, who included union leaders, were arrested countrywide during the protests. They also reported that some unionists and members of the public were assaulted, injured and admitted to hospital in Bulawayo, while others were denied medication. Studio 7 also highlighted that the police had actually picked up some union leaders from their homes the night before the demonstrations.

This kind of detail, exposing the heavy-handedness of the police was conveniently ignored in the government-controlled media, which sought to present the protests as a non-event and incident free. For example, the Chronicle (9/10), Workers ignore ZCTU demos, claimed that apart from the arrest of “two men” in Bulawayo, “the situation in the city was calm throughout the day, with business operating as usual”. This account differed from that of The Financial Gazette, which reported that the protesters had “running battles with the police” in Bulawayo.

Besides suffocating detail on the excesses of the police, The Herald (9/10) and its sister paper the Chronicle (9/10) also gave the impression that the demonstrations were only confined to Harare and Bulawayo and therefore downplayed the protest in other towns such as Mutare, Chiredzi and Chegutu. It is not surprising therefore that the papers and indeed ZTV (8/9, 8pm) only reported the arrest of 55 unionists in Harare and Bulawayo. ZTV even relegated news of this to the middle of its bulletin and merely allocated it a minute.

In fact, the unprofessional manner with which government-controlled media handled the issue was aptly demonstrated by The Herald (10/10) comment, Police action over demo laudable. Instead of viewing the police’s actions as epitomising the on-going gross violation of human rights perpetrated regularly on the citizenry through repressive laws such as POSA, the paper said, “thanks to quick thinking and swift action by police, dozens of people, including senior ZCTU officials, were arrested in Bulawayo and Harare… We commend the police for acting quickly and decisively to ensure public order and security and urge them to keep up the good work.” The comment dismissed the ZCTU’s concerns, including heavy taxation, and described reports of rights abuses as “generalisations”. It also made the ludicrous claim that the protests were staged to attract attention from the forthcoming Commonwealth summit.

It emerged that while The Herald was commending the police for upholding the rule of law, the police were themselves not clear what piece of legislation they were enforcing. For example, the police initially arrested 55 unionists in Harare and Bulawayo for violating POSA, but revised this a day later, reporting that they had been charged under the colonial Miscellaneous Offences Act, before releasing them (The Herald, 10/10). Although the paper reported the alteration of the charges, it did not see anything curious with such developments.

Further, the paper and its stable-mates ignored statements issued by both regional and international organisations condemning police actions. These were only accessed by the private media. For example, Studio 7 and SW Radio Africa (9/10) reported that regional and international labour groups such as the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had criticised the arrests of labour leaders and threatened to take action against the move.

Meanwhile, government claims that reports of anarchy and violence on farms were fabrications of the international media, received a knock following the harassment of the South African High Commissioner by overzealous beneficiaries of the chaotic land reform programme. This followed revelations by ZBC, (ZTV, 9/10) and 3FM (10/10, 6am) that South African High Commissioner to Zimbabwe Jeremiah Ndou had fallen victim to such lawlessness when resettled farmers held him hostage at a farm in Mashonaland West province.

The government-controlled broadcaster reported that Ndou was released after the intervention of the provincial governor, Peter Chanetsa. Without fully explaining the circumstances surrounding the issue, the station then tried to give excuses for the incident by claiming that Ndou had “arrived at the farm with an SABC crew which the farmers objected to as there have been a number of stage managed situations in Mashonaland West to portray lawlessness.” The station added that Ndou had not sought permission from the foreign affairs ministry to visit the area, as required by law.

The Herald (11/10) echoed this kind of justification in its follow-up report on the issue. Like ZBC, it also tried to downplay the incident saying the envoy was “briefly held” by resettled farmers at a formerly white-owned farm in Mashonaland West and “released without incident.” The paper merely said this happened after a “misunderstanding”, without elaborating.

The Standard (12/10), quoting SABC correspondent in Zimbabwe, Brian Hungwe, said Ndou and the news crew were held for two hours. It also reported that Ndou had gone to visit the farm as a result of an appeal by its owner, a South African national.
Ends.

The MEDIA UPDATE was produced and circulated by the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, 15 Duthie Avenue, Alexandra Park, Harare, Tel/fax: 263 4 703702, E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

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