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To be a people's tribune – a risky course

Thursday, April 12, 2007

A long-suffering nation feels the vise of oppression and corruption tighten even more. And as so often journalists, in their role as tribunes of the people, provide a telling measure of how badly things are going. Now another among them has been killed - more stark evidence of the country's crumbling degeneration.

The country is Zimbabwe, and the slain journalist is news cameraman Edward Chikombo. He was believed by some people – notably and ominously by some powerful people - to have passed to overseas broadcasters the compelling video images he shot last month of police viciously beating anti-government protesters. Men in plainclothes grabbed him from his home in Glenview township, Harare, and took him off in a unmarked vehicle. His beaten body was found fifty miles away.

We might have expected this kind of death. A rough yet somehow coy choice of words, rather uncommon among the political classes, had after all been applied to the police brutality Chikombo recorded … applied by the man often loosely described as Zimbabwe's "leader" - President Robert G. Mugabe (pictured above). He proclaimed in response to international protest over the arrests and beatings at March 11's prayer meeting led by opposition politician Morgan Tsvangirai, whose head policemen banged repeatedly against a wall: "The police have the right, the right to bash, to bash them. They will get arrested and get bashed by the police".

Now the police have announced they are investigating Edward Chikombo's death as a murder. "Yeah, right," one of his colleagues said to me on a buzzing phone connection from Harare.

Meanwhile the "bashing" goes on. The evocatively named writer Gift Phiri who works in-country for the exile newspaper The Zimbabwean was arrested and had his hand smashed. A document is circulating in Harare, possibly fake, possibly not, on what looks like the state secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization's letterhead and carrying a death list. Phiri's name is on it, and so is his editor's - Wilf Mbanga.

The newspaper has now had to suspend its confidential "tips" texting service, through which it receives much sensitive information sent anonymously to its London newsroom, because - the paper warns - "the security of the telephone line has been compromised".

Other tribunes of the people are now stepping forward. Over Easter the country’s nine Roman Catholic bishops pinned to all their churches’ notice-boards (in a curious echo of Catholicism’s great critic, Martin Luther nailing his testament to the Wittenberg church door) a statement demanding “a new, people-driven constitution”, or else the current “open revolt in one township after another” will become “a mass uprising”. Such a swipe at Mugabe is a rare bold step for the Church, which - while it was once a brave opponent of autocracy during white minority rule - has tended to give this President a pass despite his human rights abuses.

Reuters’ news agency put out a dispatch of news analysis on the bishops’ move, suggesting it “could have a greater influence on [Mugabe] to discuss political reform than a mass of attacks from elsewhere”. I rather doubt that, and was interested to see how few news outlets carried the agency’s think-piece. It made a point of stressing Mugabe’s attendance at Mass, and his history of largely leaving the Church alone in his land- and power-grabs (– but it didn’t delve much into his Catholic background, omitting to say, for instance, that his middle initial G is for Gabriel, as in the Archangel, or that he was born fatherless and raised among Marist Brothers).

I recall profiling Mugabe’s mixture of Catholicism and Communism for the BBC’s print magazine The Listener at a point in his rule when he was abandoning hard-line Marxist economic management in favor of more free-market principles (- it seemed a promising shift at the time, though he of course went on to traduce the free market with crony-favoring venality). I had first gotten to know him through his wife Sally Hayfron, a quiet but powerfully insistent teacher from Ghana – and my growing doubts about this once-impressive liberation fighter were compounded when, during Sally’s long and eventually fatal struggle with kidney disease, he married his secretary Grace Marufu, claiming regardless of his Catholic faith that traditional tribal custom allowed him to do so.

After Sally’s death the country’s Catholic Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa was prevailed upon to celebrate a wedding mass for Mugabe and Grace (now infamous for her profligate Parisian shopping trips) that was held at Katuma College, the Jesuit mission school where Mugabe had himself qualified as a teacher. One of his many privately-owned properties nowadays borders on the college grounds.

If you had witnessed those proceedings you too might have been dismayed by a man so evidently convinced that laws and conventions did not apply to him on a personal basis – quite apart from what he felt able to do on a national scale under the guise of “leadership”.

The bishops have marked out this coming Saturday as a day (the first of a series, they say) of fasting and prayer for a better, democratic Zimbabwe. I do not think “Bob” – as the more irreverent of his Katuma fellow-alumni call him – will be listening.



A JOURNALISTIC TRIBUNE IN ANOTHER TERRITORY THAT'S BENIGHTED, though for different reasons, has been held by unknown kidnappers for a whole month today. This time the territory is Gaza and the kidnapped journalist is Alan Johnston, the BBC's correspondent there.

Broadcasters around the world including CNN, Sky, and Al-Jazeera are marking the day with coordinated protests alongside the BBC in support of Johnston. His overall boss, Mark Thompson, the BBC's Director General, appealed in the Middle East "to all those who may have influence with the kidnappers to use their best endeavours to secure Alan's release safely and speedily".

One of Johnston's remarkable features as a reporter is the esteem in which his local counterparts, the Palestinian press, hold him. They have been calling for his release since day one - organizing protests, marches and strikes aimed at influencing the abductors (who are probably connected with with the Hamas movement). Gaza is a small patch of land, and Johnston is well known. There was even a parade of children last week, carrying Johnston's picture.

The Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti said "We in the government are deeply sorry and ashamed that this kidnapping is ongoing, especially since he is a friend of our people and has done a lot for our cause".