/ 26 September 2003

The curse of a quiet diplomacy

Last week one of my reporters, seeing about 10 police officers swarming around our newsroom, commented wryly: “You would think we were hiding weapons of mass destruction, the way they barged in and scared the hell out of everyone.”

He didn’t seem frightened though, even as the detective in charge harangued Sam Nkomo, the CEO of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), publishers of the only independent daily newspaper in Zimbabwe, The Daily News, and its recently launched sister publication, The Daily News on Sunday.

“I shall arrest you!” the detective shouted at Nkomo, a slightly-built 60-year-old who had performed his fair share of national duty during the struggle for independence.

ANZ had just been told by the Supreme Court that before it could challenge the constitutionality of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, it had to register with the Media and Information Commission, the lynchpin of a law described by commentators, journalists and human rights activists as evil, draconian and anti-democratic.

The effect of the ruling was to unleash the police on the premises of the publishing company. They were there to collect the computers and any other equipment used to produce the newspapers “unlawfully”.

Later I asked Nkomo, who had spent time in Zambia during the struggle, whether he had met President Thabo Mbeki, who had been in that country at the same time.

No, he said, he had not.

My question was pertinent in that most of what was happening to ANZ was a result of the “quiet diplomacy” launched by Mbeki to help the people of Zimbabwe find real meaning in their hard-fought independence. Quiet diplomacy had emboldened Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to conduct the affairs of his nation with a palpably outrageous disregard for the niceties of the rule of law, consensus, or even any pretence that the people’s opinions mattered.

Later, in the high court, Justice Yunus Omerjee, hearing ANZ’s challenge to the uncouth police action, was acerbic in his questioning of the hapless prosecutor assigned to handle the government’s case. “What does that mean?” he asked her after she read a passage from the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, trying to bolster the prosecution case.

At one time, the courtroom burst into raucous laughter when the prosecutor said the police had acted because they were afraid the newspaper company would hide computers.

Omerjee granted the ANZ application with an emphatic reference to the lawlessness of the police action.

But since 2000, when the wheels started coming off the experimental vehicle that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF ruling party hoped to bamboozle the rest of the world into believing was heading for democracy, the rule of law has been virtually moribund in Zimbabwe.

This was just one episode during the turbulent four-year existence of The Daily News. Long before its printing press in Harare was bombed in 2001, a junior reporter got the fright of his life when Mugabe asked him: “Who is funding your newspaper?”

Before the bombing, key Zanu-PF personnel, including Jonathan Moyo, the architect of the obnoxious Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, had warned that it was time something was done about The Daily News, then under the editorship of Geoff Nyarota. To this day, there have been no arrests for the bombing.

Mbeki has virtually endorsed the two elections others have condemned as grievously flawed — the parliamentary elections in 2000 and last year’s presidential elections. To challenges to take a more principled and tough stance against Mugabe, Mbeki has said the people of Zimbabwe must be allowed to sort out their own mess. He has also pleaded for a chance to apply his quiet diplomacy, which many Zimbabweans now believe to be responsible for Mugabe’s mounting arrogance. Mugabe’s refusal to countenance any resumption of dialogue with the Movement for Democratic Change has been cited as another product of Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy.

If the actions against ANZ and its newspapers result in their demise, it will be on Mbeki’s head.

Quiet diplomacy will have helped a ruling party alleged to have staged one of the biggest election frauds in history to silence its fiercest domestic critic.

It may leave most Zimbabweans with little option but to wage their own struggle against quiet diplomacy.

Bill Saidi is editor of The Daily News on Sunday

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