I wouldn’t recommend a weekend at the Harare Central Hotel if you are proposing to visit Zimbabwe. Some of the staff can be over-attentive and the room service leaves a lot to be desired. Mosquitoes nibbled at our bare feet all night while cockroaches the size of rats scuttled about. The toilets? Don’t even mention the toilets.
In case you haven’t gathered, Harare Central is the main police station in Zimbabwe’s capital, replete with holding cells for the detention of the increasing numbers of accused persons passing through the country’s creaking criminal justice system.
Political offenders such as myself and two Zimbabwe Independent staff members, news editor Vincent Kahiya and chief reporter Dumisani Muleya, were guests there last weekend for two days and two long nights in the company of carjackers, fraudsters and a prominent Zanu-PF member of Parliament who is accused of obstructing the course of justice.
We were charged with criminal defamation for reporting that President Robert Mugabe commandeered an Air Zimbabwe plane for his recent holiday in the Far East.
It is not disputed that Mugabe used the plane to ferry him between Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. But the state, or more to the point Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, took great exception to the word “commandeer”.
“This is not the first time the paper had written lies that are blasphemous and disrespectful to the president,” he fulminated.
Within hours of Moyo’s threat that the editor and the two writers of the report would be made to account for what he called their “fictional story”, detectives arrived at my home saying they wanted to interview me. At the same time they picked up my two colleagues. We were not interviewed but quickly consigned to the holding cells.
For those detained at Harare Central, the removal of shoes and watches may be the worst part of their ordeal — exposed to unhygienic floors and never knowing what time it is. Others may cite the absence of privacy in crowded cells — some with up to 30 people crammed in a confined space. But for me the chief terror was the long nights.
Lying sleepless on those cold concrete floors, I recalled previous visits to what used to be Salisbury Central. My first was in 1970 when I was arrested for leading a student demonstration against the Smith regime. We were made to sit on the lawns that form a quadrangle between the maze of colonial-era offices. The lawns and flowerbeds are still well-tended. But many of the offices, like those of the Law and Order section, which is the main instrument of Mugabe’s crackdown on civil society, lie underground, are poorly lit and could do with a lick of paint. Seventies vintage typewriters are still very much in use.
We were asked by the magistrate at our Monday hearing if we had any complaints against the police. We had none. It was not their decision to detain us over a weekend. But we were as mad as hell with Moyo for putting us through this ordeal, separated from our families and loved ones who didn’t know when they would see us again.
At the same time we understood perfectly well this is the price journalists pay to practise their profession in Zimbabwe today.
It appeared the main purpose of our interrogation was to ascertain the identities of our sources at Air Zimbabwe.
Moyo had spoken of “criminal collusion” between airline officials and reporters at our paper. But we explained that just as the police do not disclose the names of sources in their investigations, we do not reveal ours.
Would Air Zimbabwe lie about the arrangements for Mugabe’s flight, we were asked? Quite possibly, we replied. It lied when it said the reduction of its fleet from 18 planes at independence in 1980 to five today — with only three operational — did not represent a depletion of any sort and that it had enough aircraft to service routes!
Criminal defamation is a relic of empire, part of English common law that acquired a Roman-Dutch personality en route from South Africa. It was wielded by colonial governments to deal with nationalist leaders and critics in the press. In recent years it has been struck down by courts in other jurisdictions as incompatible with democratic practice.
Ghana and Sri Lanka are the most recent countries to have revoked it. But we are not surprised to see it still lurking in the armoury of Zimbabwe’s vindictive executive.
In all our statements after our release we have made it clear that this case is not about Mugabe’s reputation. It is about public accountability. Mugabe is the country’s most senior public official. Air Zimbabwe is a publicly owned airline. Both are accountable to Zimbabweans for the management of public funds. It is the right and duty of newspapers to submit political leaders to scrutiny. That we shall go on doing.
Judging by the warmth of the reception we received after our release, and given growing anger with Mugabe’s incorrigible misrule, Zimbabweans clearly expect no less from us.
Iden Wetherell, Vincent Kahiya and Dumisani Muleya are out on bail. Two more Zimbabwe Independent employees were arrested on Wednesday in connection with the article