Hours before its printing works was destroyed in a bomb blast, top Zim officials vowed to silence the Daily News. Mercedes Sayagues reports
State terrorism has escalated in Zimbabwe with Sunday’s bomb attack on the independent newspaper, the Daily News.
Experts estimate that five TM46 anti-tank landmines fitted with limpet-type detonators destroyed the 60cm thick and 20cm long cast-iron rollers on the presses.
Only the Zimbabwe Corps of Engineers and three special forces units could have access to the Chinese or Russian-made TM46 and the technical expertise to carry such a professional sabotage, says Michael Quintana, editor of Africa Defence Journal, who identified the landmines used.
So far the armed forces’ role in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s repressive domestic campaign has been to provide trucks and fuel to farm invaders and to grab land. Farm invasions and rural intimidation hinged on the Zanu-PF militia and the Central Intelligence Organisation, with the army backing up logistics.
The bombing shows a qualitative jump in army involvement, coupled with arrogant disregard for self-incrimination a signature bombing.
“Who has access to the national armouries where landmines are stored?” asks Trevor Ncube, editor and publisher of The Independent.
While junior officers in the army and police force may not support Mugabe, their top brass, publicly implicated in many corrupt deals and the Matabeleland massacres are tied to him.
“I have no doubt in my mind that this was done with the knowledge of the highest office in the land,” says Ncube.
Hours before the bombing, the Minister for Information, Jonathan Moyo, and war veteran leader Dr Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi vowed to silence the Daily News. The pretext was the paper’s report on popular joy at the death of Democratic Republic of Congo strongman Laurent Kabila.
Last week the Daily News offices were besieged by a mob and its reporters assaulted. The day before the bombing a crowd burnt copies of the paper with the British and American flags in downtown Harare.
In retaliation, youth in the townships soaked in the rain piles of the government mouthpieces The Herald and the Sunday Mail.
In less than two years of existence, the Daily News has seen its circulation soar to 150?000 at the height of the parliamentary elections last year while The Herald plummeted by half to 70?000.
“The independent press is under siege. Journalists will be killed, sooner rather than later,” says Basildon Peta, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists.
“As long as the international community remains aloof, it is giving Mugabe a green light to attack us.”
Meanwhile, an attempt is being made to restore the honour of Zimbabwe’s war veterans.
“This is a de facto coup,” says Dzinashe Machingura. “There is no longer constitutional rule in Zimbabwe.”
Machingura (50) is a veteran of the liberation war and an outspoken critic of Mugabe, the man who is officially his patron. But Machingura and a bunch of other fighters accuse him of betraying the struggle. Nor do they recognise Hunzvi as their leader or a true war veteran.
“He was an office boy in Lusaka,” scoffs Machingura. “The media has made him big.”
Machingura is chair of the Zimbabwe Liberators’ Platform (ZLP), formed in June last year to restore the honour of war veterans, the ideals of the liberation struggle and good governance in Zimbabwe. “We did not fight to free one individual who would rule over all of us,” he says.
Says Richard Chiwara, chair of the northern ZLP: “We fought for self-determination, for majority rule, for the right to vote, and now these so-called war veterans prohibit people from voting for their choice.”
In the ZLP executive are men of impeccable liberation credentials like former Zimbabwe’s People Army (Zipa) commanders Webster Gwauya and Machingura. (Zipa resumed the armed struggle in 1976 after the arrest of political leaders). Both were jailed by Mugabe for three years under harsh conditions in Mozambique.
The ZLP says it has about 500 active members and many more who, while disliking Hunzvi’s tactics and ideas, are afraid to speak out. Amid economic hardship, they fear losing their jobs and businesses, or the pensions and free health and education for their children granted in 1997.
That was when war veterans marched on the political stage, led by the controversial Hunzvi. Mugabe granted 50?000 fighters a lump payment and monthly pensions that wrecked the economy but earned the president a private militia the Hunzvi faction.
“Villagers should have been compensated, the old men and women who sacrificed their last chicken to feed the fighters,” says writer Chenjerai Hove. “War veterans have become mercenaries.”
The ZLP says Hunzvi’s militiamen are not true war veterans. Machingura says only 50 veterans command the farm invasions, while unemployed youth and Zanu-PF members make up the paid militia.
Hunzvi’s militiamen based in Bikita during the recent by-elections complained to the Daily News, as reported in its emergency edition after the bombing, that Zanu-PF still owed them the daily fee of Z$150 (about $2) for intimidating voters in the district.
In a statement condemning the bomb attack on the Daily News, the ZLP deplored “the environment of lawlessness, anarchy and violence” created by Zanu-PF, and that “the police have allowed rogue war veterans to become a law unto themselves”.
In the past two weeks militia closed down several district offices to harass pro-opposition civil servants. They handcuffed striking teachers and took them to the police.
Vice-President Joseph Msika warned this week that the war veterans are losing direction. The ZLP says it was lost a long time ago.
@Bedside promises come to naught
A family that fell victim to a pipe bomb more than three years ago is still battling to get medical assistance
Marianne Merten
On September 22 1997 a pipe bomb ripped through the Toffar family home in Surrey Estate on the Cape Flats. Six-week-old Saadiqah was killed, Jureij (7) lost a leg, Fazlin (4) sustained severe burns, Aiysha (5) was emotionally scarred and their mother lost most of her eyesight and hearing in one ear.
More than three years later the family is still struggling with medical complications and the trauma they experienced. They became victims long before national consciousness was pricked by the explosions at the Planet Hollywood restaurant on the Cape Town waterfront and St Elmo’s pizzeria in Camps Bay.
It has taken Shireen Toffar until now to muster the courage to openly discuss the attack and the personal account she has written about the ordeal. Her relatives are refusing to read it.
“It is only now that we can sit and have a conversation about this,” Toffar says. The children are afraid of the dark and will not sleep without a light. Her eldest daughter still receives medi-cal treatment each month and every three months her son has to have his artificial leg checked at hospital.
In 1997 police recorded at least 65 pipe bomb explosions and, in the second half of that year, some 133 violent incidents on the Cape Flats in the battle between anti-drug vigilantes and gangsters.
Detectives believe the bombing of the Toffar family was a case of mistaken identity: a woman with a similar name and suspected of dealing drugs lived in the same road. “The Toffar family cannot be linked to any criminal activities and they lived a normal life up to this cowardly attack,” a detective wrote a year later.
Shireen Toffar’s account of the attack is a detailed and painful read.
“I saw something coming through my room window with full force and fall on my son’s leg. The room was full of smoke and the glass of the window was shattered all over us. It was dark with smoke and it was almost like fire crackers shooting around. I tried to touch my face but it was burning and bleeding. My hand was full of blood.”
She managed to get her two daughters to the upstairs neighbours and ask for help. She rushed back to get her son and baby out of the burning rooms, but couldn’t get near because of the smoke. A neighbour pulled her out. “As I was standing with my daughters outside I started to get hysterical and shouted: ‘Somebody, please, my children are still inside!'”
In the ambulance on the way to hospital Toffar realised her baby was dead. “The tears can’t stop rolling as the pain and my children’s crying couldn’t stop going though my mind. I brought my daughters to safety. The man brought my son to safety. I did my best to save my children but the most hurtful was [that] I couldn’t save my baby daughter. I will have to live with the nightmare and pain for the rest of my life,” Toffar writes.
Baby Saadiqah died just six weeks after being born by emergency caesarean. “She was born in a critical condition I only saw her two days after she was born. I went to the nursery and saw her head was in a square box. Her body was full of heart plugs and she had a drip in her forehead.”
The baby was buried according to Muslim custom the next day. Her father had to identify the burnt corpse at the government mortuary and still does not talk about it. In contrast, little Fazlin told everyone after her release from hospital: “You know we burnt. My boeta [brother] lost his leg.”
Recovery has been slow. “My son has his on and off days with his false limb … My youngest daughter is still wearing a pressure garment on her left arm. My eldest daughter is starting to talk and be herself again. I am still wearing lens spectacles and often get eye infections,” writes Toffar more than a year later.
The local community helped the family restart their lives with furniture, clothing and cash when Toffar was released from hospital a month after the blast, following two operations on her eyes and one on her ear. The support her son and eldest daughter received at school has also helped the family cope. But various hospital bedside promises of help by dignitaries and politicians remain unfulfilled.
During 1999 Toffar wrote to then deputy president Thabo Mbeki. In October last year his office replied that her request for help was referred to the Western Cape Premier, Gerald Morkel. The premier’s office in turn passed it on to the provincial ministry for social services and poverty relief.
Last March Toffar received a letter from the MEC’s administrative secretary saying she did not qualify for a care dependant grant for her son. The letter said enquiries about a bomb blast victims’ fund showed “it was established for the truth and reconcili-ation commission and you will therefore not qualify for any assistance”.
Yet bomb survivors can apply for assistance with medical costs from the Western Cape Emergency Relief Trust a combination of various funds established in the wake of high-profile explosions such as the August 1998 Planet Hollywood and December 1999 St Elmo’s blasts. Volunteer managing trustee Jill Ritchie says although the trust is “the last port of call” any victim of urban terror can apply.
After months of struggle Toffar finally received her first temporary disability payment in mid-2000. She still cannot afford the eye operation that could give her a chance of finding work to help her husband support the family. For the past three years they have lived in various one-bedroom backyard accommodations.
“I have my on and off days. If my door is closed it’s not because I don’t want to be with my family, I just want to be alone with my thoughts on the ordeal,” says Toffar. “I haven’t overcome it. Everything is working on my nerves. Maybe now, three years later, it’s all coming out.”