Defending 'Mugabe's gulags' immoral

Defending 'Mugabe's gulags' immoral

HARROWING: A prisoner has water poured over him for a morning 'shower' in the SABC film

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By Francois Maimona
Posted to the web: 15/04/2009 00:08:03
THE article by Henry Makowa 'Media Freedom and Zimbabwean prisons film' makes certain assertions that I feel cannot go unchallenged.

I will start with the elementary precepts underpinning a viable and functioning democracy with special regard to freedom of the press and its role as a watchdog. Open and accountable government, as Beetham [1994] (Defining and Measuring Democracy [pp 25-30]) has formulated, is achieved through popular control which requires, besides elections, the continuous accountability of government: directly, to the electorate, through the public justification for its policies; indirectly, to agents acting on the people's behalf.

It is a given that accountability depends upon public knowledge of what government is up to, from sources that are independent of its own public relations machine. A media landscape free of government control is obviously a prerequisite. Popular control over state institutions is underpinned by guaranteed civil and political liberties.

However, these freedoms relate to free citizens. Prisoners, despite the fact that they have forfeited their liberty, retain certain basic rights, which survive despite imprisonment. The rights of access to the courts and of respect for one’s bodily integrity - that is, not to be assaulted - are such fundamental rights.

Under what passes for the penal system in Zimbabwe right at this moment, prisoners are lucky to finish their sentences in one piece - they are dying like flies, at least 20 prisoner deaths a day, according to human rights groups.

Broadly speaking, the State is allowed to place limits on prisoners' rights if it is considered necessary for the prevention of crime, for prison security or to protect the safety of the prisoner or others. Any limitations placed upon such rights must be proportionate to the aim that the authorities are seeking to achieve.

Freedom of the press as encapsulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers”, is something that has been absent in Zimbabwe. It has taken a foreign broadcaster, namely SABC 3 to show the evils that are going on behind the death factories that the penal system in Zimbabwe has become.

It is a sad indictment of the health of press freedom in Zimbabwe itself if it takes an external broadcaster to expose such shortcomings. However, it has not been ordinary journalistic practice in Zimbabwe to expose such failures of state institutions. Makowa's justification for such a state of affairs is that the media in Zimbabwe cannot be trusted to exercise its function as a watchdog because anybody in Zimbabwe can practice journalism after acquiring “just a three or six month diploma or certificate training”. Presumably the author never ventures to give us names of institutions peddling such diplomas, inside or outside Zimbabwe.

For the best part of the past 28 or so years, Zanu PF has maintained an iron grip on all aspects of the media in Zimbabwe. Naturally, it comes as a shock to someone not accustomed to the workings of a free press when the failure of such an important state institution as the penal system in Zimbabwe is exposed warts and all for the world to see.

The press is a necessity in order to hold those responsible for prisoners’ welfare to account. It is such fortune-cookie philosophising masquerading as intellectualising that enables the State to victimise those courageous enough to stand for truth and justice. What we witness is a state that violates and visits untold indignities on the weakest members of if society.

It is misplaced patriotic pride that motivates analysts of Makowa's ilk when they uphold the repressive machinery that Zanu PF has kept in place for the past generation simply to keep the prying eyes of ordinary citizens from seeing for themselves what the state is up to.

The purpose of any penal system is the rehabilitation of offenders. But what is now patently evident is that one is lucky if at all they cone out alive in what is becoming the Zimbabwean equivalent of Stalin's gulags. Are we then to simply sweep such infringements of fundamental freedoms under the carpet simply because it goes contra to the 'laws of Zimbabwe?'

Unjust pieces of legislation that violate fundamental precepts of all civilised society have no place in a democracy. Remarkably, Makowa does not bother to tell us which enactments have been violated. In the event, an article in a newspaper column is not the right forum to protest or even to expose the flouting of what the author calls 'laws of Zimbabwe'.

It is an abuse of poetic licence when one equates the media's right to inform citizens of what is going on behind prison walls to imperialism. This smacks of hypocrisy of the highest magnitude. Nor does it to do any good to invoke tenets of democracy such as the rule of law and then one goes on to defend a morally bankrupt regime through the thin veneer of legality.

In the court of public opinion, SABC 3 is a champion of fundamental freedoms. When people who should be rehabilitated by the state are dying like flies, this makes nonsense of the very basic notions of dignity that is owed to all of us by virtue of our very own humanity.

A system that lays waste to human life on such a scale cannot be defended by any sane human being. It is repugnant and irreprehensible.

Francois Maimona is a trainee lawyer based in Leeds. E-mail: fmaimona@googlemail.com
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