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Amateur spin, willful manipulation and naked propaganda
New Zimbabwe.com editor Mduduzi Mathuthu, in his column Stories from Many Places defended himself from attacks by Geoffrey Nyarota in his Financial Gazette column last week. In the spirit of fair play, we allow Nyarota's reply:
By Geoff Nyarota
IN MY column in The Financial
Gazette on Thursday, July 27, 2006, I effectively quashed spurious allegations
that have been leveled against me on New Zimbabwe.com and in The Zimbabwe
Independent that, as editor of The Chronicle, I actively urged the notorious
Five Brigade to massacre innocent Ndebele peasants during the Gukurahundi
era.
I believe I also proved beyond reasonable doubt that the vicious onslaught
launched against me is a facet of the malicious campaign launched by
a few individuals in the media with a personal vendetta against me.
I easily dismissed as purely spurious and false the information that
had been touted as evidence of my irrefutable complicity with Five Brigade.
On Tuesday the editor of New Zimbabwe.com, Mduduzi Mathuthu, responded.
The center-piece of what was supposed to be his coup de grace were judiciously
selected snippets from an editorial comment published in The Chronicle
on June 3, 1987.
In lieu of solid facts and incontrovertible evidence New Zimbabwe
offered its readers the usual diet of amateur spin, willful manipulation
of information and outright propaganda. As if acting on a cue, the small
coterie of war-mongers who sustain the New Zimbabwe discussion
forum went into a frenzy of renewed hostility.
This forum has become
a veritable sanctuary for pseudo-investigative journalists. Hiding behind
flamboyant pseudonyms they routinely indulge themselves by exposing
alleged scoops. Their ranks appear to have been recently swelled by
obvious CIO agents, whose primary professional purposes appears to be
to stir up ethnic animosity among Zimbabweans and to target so-called
enemies of the government.
If it wasn't for the defamatory and rabidly tribal nature of the majority
of contributions, the forum would provide captivating entertainment.
So that New
Zimbabwe.com readers can, for a change, exercise their democratic
right to make up their own minds the following is the full text of the
editorial comment published in The Chronicle issue in question,
under the headline, "Bring back the Five Brigade":
"The resurgence of dissident activity in the Midlands and Matabeleland
Provinces resulting in the murder of ten people since the collapse of
the unity talks between Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu in April is more than a
coincidence.
The slaying of two policemen, a tractor driver and two Federal German
tourists this week alone shows that these trigger-happy gangsters are
on the warpath once again and are choosing their targets carefully.
To instill fear and force farmers off the land appears to be the objective
behind the killings in the Midlands, with a view to crippling the agricultural
sector and invariably frustrating the Government.
The dissidents, evidently, have also set out to disrupt the tourist
industry, a vital source of foreign currency for the country. Five years
ago the industry took a beating after the abduction and subsequent murder
of six foreign tourists, and it took several years for it to recover.
The Government had to step in to keep a number of hotels throughout
the country going because of the decline in the number of tourists,
as a result of the publicity the murders received abroad.
The tourist figures subsequently climbed gradually to a healthy position
last year, which saw nearly half-a-million tourists visiting Zimbabwe,
representing a growth rate during the past two years of 14 percent.
Now the dissidents are trying to set the clock back.
This should not be allowed to happen and the Government must act strongly
and decisively. The only way we can think of that would effectively
check this dissident menace is to deploy the crack 5 Brigade in Matabeleland
again and in the Midlands.
This seems the only language the dissidents and their collaborators understand.
While The Chronicle
clearly urged government to deploy Five Brigade to deal specifically
with the resurgence of widespread dissident activity, New Zimbabwe.com
now seeks to achieve an impossible task. Mathuthu is attempting to influence
the public to believe that at the material time, in the 1980s, if one
referred in writing or in conversation to "dissidents and their
collaborators", one was normally understood by all right-thinking
people of the time to be referring to the innocent rural population
of Matabeleland.
Such outright spin is mischievous. It has no place in professional journalism.
Mathuthu realised that if he published in full this or the other comments
his case would instantly go up in smoke.
Apart from that, to fully appreciate the import of this editorial comment
one needs to take into account the political situation in which it was
crafted.
In December 1987, a mere six months after this editorial was published
in The Chronicle Zimbabwe's two most powerful and influential
politicians, then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe and Dr Joshua Mqabuko
Nkomo, accompanied by high-powered delegations, sat around a conference
table, following an extended period of negotiation, involving a total
of ten meetings.
The leaders of Zanu-PF
and PF-Zapu, respectively, proceeded to sign the much acclaimed Unity
Agreement, which resulted in peace finally descending on Matabeleland
and the Silobela and Lower Gweru districts of the Midlands Province.
It is stated in the preamble to the agreement that:
"Conscious of the historical links between Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu
in the struggle for national independence and democracy through the
strategy of the armed struggle and their alliance under the banner of
the Patriotic Front;
Cognisant of
the fact that the two parties jointly command the support of the overwhelming
majority of the people of Zimbabwe, as evidenced by the general election
results of 1980 and 1985 respectively;
Notwithstanding that Zanu-PF commands a greater percentage of the said
overwhelming majority of the people of Zimbabwe;
Desirous to unite our nation; establish peace, law and order and to guarantee social and economic development and political stability;
Determined
to eliminate and end the insecurity and violence caused by dissidents
in Matabeleland;
Convinced that national unity, political stability, peace, law and order,
social and economic development can only be achieved to their fullest
under conditions of peace and the unity primarily of Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu;
We, the two leaders of Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu, that is to say Comrade Robert
Gabriel Mugabe, First Secretary and President of Zanu-PF, and Comrade
Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, President of PF-Zapu, assisted by a sub-committee
of equal members of Zanu-PF and PF-Zapu, held ten meetings to discuss
the possible unity of our two parties."
Surprisingly, "insecurity and violence caused by dissidents in
Matabeleland" were clearly the major concern even in the minds
of Dr Nkomo and his delegation as they signed the Unity Agreement. The
major preoccupation of the democratically elected political leadership
of Matabeleland was to eradicate the dissident menace. The Chronicle
stands condemned today for expressing similar anti-dissident sentiments.
Surprisingly, New Zimbabwe does not extend its condemnation
to cover the PF-Zapu leadership, as well.
In the book Turmoil and Tenacity, which was published in 1989,
Professor Welshman Ncube, a leading Ndebele academic and a University
of Zimbabwe law lecturer, who was to become the secretary general of
the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), on its formation 10 years
later, dwelt at length on the issue of the issue of the dissidents.
In a chapter which he contributed to this book, Ncube dwelt on the issue
of the emergence and the eventual elimination of banditry from western
Zimbabwe:
"After the sacking of ZAPU ministers from government in 1982,"
Ncube wrote, "a number of former Zipra combatants had taken
back to the bush. In January 1984, the then Minister of Home Affairs,
in seeking a renewal of the State of Emergency, informed the House of
Assembly that in the preceding six months these armed men had murdered
75 people, carried out 284 robberies and been involved in 16 rapes.
Two years later, in January 1986, the Minister of Home Affairs in seeking
yet another renewal of the State of Emergency informed Parliament that
during the previous six months of 1985 dissidents had murdered 103 people,
raped 57 women, committed 263 armed robberies and destroyed property
worth millions of dollars.
In material terms the dissident war was devastating in that virtually
all development projects in Matabeleland had been brought to a standstill
and that, for example, by early 1984 nearly 500 000 acres of commercial
farmland had been abandoned by fearful white farmers in Matabeleland.
In attempting to eradicate banditry and dissidents the government sent
the army into Matabeleland. The activities of the army in the process
gave rise to accusations of severe brutality by the army against innocent
people. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, the Catholic
Bishops' Conference, Amnesty International and the Lawyers' Committee
for Human Rights, all pointed out that the security forces had abused
their powers in operations against dissidents.
This reference to the ugly occurrences associated with the banditry
problems in Matabeleland and the Midlands ought to be made so that the
success and benefits of national unity can be viewed within their proper
context. After the signing of the Unity Agreement and the installation
of Robert Mugabe as the first Executive President of Zimbabwe, the new
President declared a general amnesty and in terms of Section 31(1) of
the Constitution of Zimbabwe granted a free pardon to all dissidents
who, on or before March 31, 1988, reported to the police in order to
claim benefit of the pardon. He
also pardoned all Zapu political fugitives who were out of the country
to escape prosecution and all persons who had collaborated with dissidents
in violation of the laws of Zimbabwe.
Zapu politicians, Zanu-PF politicians, the churches and the Press
all appealed to dissidents to take advantage of the free pardon and
surrender to the
police. By midnight of May 31, 1989, virtually all dissidents had reported
to the police to take advantage of the pardon.
Even the long
hunted butcher of the Esigodini missionaries, Morgan Sango, surrendered
with a badly broken arm. With the surrender of all the dissidents, peace
returned to Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. The atrocities and
brutalities that had been characteristic of dissident activities all
came to an abrupt end. For the first time since the liberation war started
in earnest in the early seventies, the people of Matabeleland were experiencing
normal life."
Ncube attributes all atrocities and brutalities in Matabeleland to the
dissidents. From Ncube's eloquent exposition it is clear that if The
Chronicle supported the deployment of government troops to deal
specifically with dissidents, that support cannot logically be equated
now to urging Five Brigade to massacre thousands of innocent civilians,
as suggested by journalists on New Zimbabwe.com.
In his supposedly devastating expose on Tuesday Mathuthu makes a total
three snide references to my recently published book, Against the
Grain. He has obviously read it but lacks the professional integrity
to say so. The following is an extract from Chapter Seven:
"Following his political humiliation on the shores of Lake
Kariba in 1985, Enos Nkala returned to base in Bulawayo with a vengeance.
Long after Mugabe formed Zimbabwe's first majority-rule government,
and long after Nkomo and his partners had been expelled from that government,
Nkala continued to use inflammatory language and to taunt PF-Zapu at
any available opportunity and to hurl abuse at and threaten Nkomo relentlessly,
mostly at weekend rallies held in Bulawayo, and elsewhere in Matabeleland.
Despite his dismal showing in the 1985 election Nkala was appointed
minister of home affairs. Relentless in his Matabeleland campaign, he
used his newly acquired ministerial power in a vindictive endeavor to
crush PF-Zapu altogether. Nkala transformed PISI, a secretive and elite
division within the ministry of home affairs, into virtually a personal
corps. Wearing plain clothes and wielding wide powers of arrest and
similar to the dreaded CIO in its operations, PISI roamed the suburbs
of Bulawayo spreading terror and mayhem.
"We want to wipe out the ZAPU leadership," Nkala declared
menacingly soon after he assumed office. "The murderous organization
and its murderous leadership must be hit so hard that it doesn't feel
obliged to do the things it has been doing."
This must be the statement which prompted the "Hit them hard"
headline in The Herald which is being peddled 21 years later
as irrefutable evidence that I urged Five Brigade to massacre innocent
Ndebele peasants.
I had nothing to do with The Herald.
Nyarota writes from the United States
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