Wilf Mbanga: ‘Zimbabwean government realised that burning the news attracts world headlines’

By Chris Kay

In Zimbabwe there are nervous and wishful whispers that the banned independent press may return. Yet, Wilf Mbanga, the self-expelled editor of The Zimbabwean newspaper based in the UK, is in no rush to fly home to the troubled country.

“It’s safe here for me. I don’t have to worry about a knock on the door at 4am in the morning,” he says.

A critic of President Robert Mugabe’s regime, Mbanga was arrested in 2001. In 2003 the government shut down Zimbabwe’s only independent national newspaper, The Daily News, where he was the publisher’s managing director.

“[The state-controlled media] declared me an enemy of the people,” he says. The same year he fled to the Netherlands before settling in the UK.

After working as a journalist for 40 years, Mbanga launched The Zimbabwean, a weekly newspaper, starting off with a modest circulation of 5,000 copies in the UK and South Africa.

“Zimbabweans in the diaspora are desperate for information from back home,” he explains.

Realising the popularity of The Zimbabwean, the print run increased to 200,000 and began to send truckloads into Zimbabwe itself. It soon became the country’s best selling newspaper.

The Zimbabwean is now at the heart of the struggle to dislodge Mugabe’s iron grip on the country.

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British Airways ‘in shock return to Zimbabwe’

The official told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport and Communication that a deal has been reached to re-open the connection.

“British Airways will be coming back next year between March and April and that is why we have hope [of increased tourism] in 2010,” state-run The Herald quoted Mr Chaota as saying. He added: “The coming back of BA may also bring in other airlines.”

Global carriers including Lufthansa, Air France and Qantas axed flights to Zimbabwe during the height of political tensions, but a recent power-sharing deal between Mr Mugabe and longstanding rival Morgan Tsvangirai has improved the country’s outlook.

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Robert Mugabe Refuses to Budge Over Cabinet Boycott

President Robert Mugabe has shrugged off the former opposition’s boycott of Zimbabwe’s unity government, saying he would not yield to pressure to make concessions, state media reported on Saturday.

Mugabe and his former opposition foe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, formed a power-sharing government in February to end a political stalemate that followed last year’s elections.

A new crisis hit the government last week when Tsvangirai and his MDC party said it would stop attending cabinet meetings in protest against the arrest of a senior official and Mugabe’s refusal to implement a political pact in full.

In his first public comments on the matter, Mugabe said his party had fulfilled its part of the agreement and he would not to yield to MDC pressure, according to the state-controlled Herald newspaper.

“The matters the people are complaining about in the MDC are that we should now voluntarily … give away aspects of our authority. We will not do that,” Mugabe was quoted saying.

“They (MDC) can go to any summit, any part of the world to appeal. That will not happen.”

Mugabe added that he did not believe the unity government faced collapse.

“I do not read that they would want to leave the inclusive government. I think they will come back to it soon.”

The Herald said Mugabe and Tsvangirai would resume their weekly meetings on Monday to try to end the impasse.

Tsvangirai, who has been on a regional tour to seek help from leaders who brokered the power-sharing deal, told reporters in Angola on Friday his dispute with Mugabe was a temporary setback that would not lead to the collapse of the pact.

(Reporting by Nelson Banya, editing by Andrew Dobbie)

Mugabe and the White African: taking Zimbabwe’s plight to the world

By Andrew Thompson

Mugabe and the White African is a covertly-filmed documentary about a white Zimbabwean family’s stand against Robert Mugabe’s land reform campaign. Co-director Andrew Thompson reveals how the film was made against enormous odds

Michael Campbell is one of a handful of white farmers still left in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned land for redistribution to poor black Zimbabweans. Since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife among the majority of the country’s citizens. But Campbell, 74, refuses to back down. Our film, Mugabe and the White African, follows Campbell and his family’s unprecedented attempt to take Mugabe to an international court on charges of racial discrimination and violation of their human rights, against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections.

It was always our intention to make a really cinematic film, as well as a powerful documentary. So we needed to shoot on a large format: a departure from the hidden-camera news footage that more commonly comes out of Zimbabwe. Images and sound are so important in adding texture and layers to a place, and we wanted the audience to feel really immersed.

But having big cameras, a sound crew and proper recording devices did make it even harder to shoot in a country where filming is, to this day, banned (the only exception appears to be for al-Jazeera). We risked imprisonment or worse if caught – one reason why we get so little news coming out of the country. What makes our film special is that it offers the only insight the outside world has of what is going on behind Zimbabwe’s closed borders, of life lived under Mugabe’s regime.

We were filming during last year’s contested presidential elections, so security was even more tense than usual. On the ground this meant you couldn’t go far before you hit a roadblock manned by the interior security force. It was pretty hairy getting about. We always used different borders on each of the five trips, different transport, and I slept in different safe houses every night to keep moving. Our golden rule, which I was only forced to break once, was to always travel separately from the equipment.

We got away with it – just. After every trip there would be the inevitable knock on the door of Michael Campbell’s farm. The security forces were never more than two days behind me.

I’m quite used to working in hostile environments. I’ve previously made films in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Gaza. But filming in places like that is considerably more straightforward than shooting in Zimbabwe. In Gaza, the buck stops with Hamas. There, if you’ve got their blessing, you can stand on a street corner and film. In Zimbabwe you couldn’t. There was no rule of law. You were not supposed to be there, full stop. Zimbabwe was an infinitely scarier country to shoot in. You were never quite sure who was your friend or enemy. Mugabe had instilled such mistrust in people.

One of the white farmers we followed said you could be standing in church with someone who, the next day, would turn up at your farm with an iron bar in his hand and a gang of armed thugs by his side. There was constant fear all over the country. It sounds odd to say it, but in Gaza people felt and looked happier. They smiled. Life went on. But in Zimbabwe, it had stopped. It was not like in the rest of Africa, where you could have people selling mangoes and tomatoes on the roadside; it was like a country that had shut down. There were just shadows. This was the picture in 2008 and, according to most reports, the situation has only worsened.

Zimbabwe is a former British colony, and so there’s a tendency to presume the white farmers shouldn’t be there. Part of what appealed to us about making this documentary is that it wrestles with some uncomfortable questions. At one point, Michael Campbell’s son-in-law, Ben Freeth, asks, “Can you be white and African?” Well can you be white and American, or black and American? Of course you can. Racism is a terrible thing, whether it’s perpetrated by whites or blacks.

This film is ultimately about human rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are universals we should all care about. Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible dictator, responsible for serious human rights abuses, and those who oppose the regime are abducted, beaten, tortured and killed.

And what does the world do? Currently, very little. African leaders seem loath to criticise one of their own and the west sits on the fence, paralysed by the fear of being called neo-colonialists or racists.

Zimbabweans need the west not to wobble on sanctions. They need them to stick to the stance that the power-sharing government, the so-called unity government, is anything but. It is a government of disunity that shouldn’t be formally acknowledged. To say that we in the west recognise the government in Zimbabwe would be a catastrophic mistake for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans trapped in their own country. It would send out all the wrong messages that Mugabe is someone we could do business with. If this film can go some way towards bringing to an outside audience the injustices going on inside Zimbabwe – and, more importantly, get something done about it – then I feel that we as film-makers will have succeeded.

• Mugabe and the White African is showing at the Ritzy at 6.30pm tonight, as part of the London film festival

Raila Odinga urges Mugabe to relinquish power in Zimbabwe

The Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, in Paris, France, on Tuesday, urged President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to relinquish power, saying he alone was “responsible for the political stalemate” in his country.

“In Zimbabwe, Mr. Mugabe is not part of the solution to the political problem; he himself, is the problem,” Odinga told a joint press conference with the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

“The faster the international community acts to convince him to relinquish power, the better it will be for the Zimbabwean people who have already suffered a lot.

“Moreover it’s high time these political compromises were stopped that, in our countries, allow losers to remain in power,” Odinga said, undoubtedly hinting at the political situation in his own country, where he had claimed victory in the presidential election of December 2007 before accepting a compromise to share power with President Mwai Kibaki.

In Zimbabwe, a similar agreement was implemented in setting up a broad coalition government, with the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as Prime Minister and Robert Mugabe keeping his seat as President, whereas each of them claimed victory in the March 2008 election, which sparked fears of a civil unrest in the country.

However, the political crisis cropped up again last Wednesday, after the vice minister of agriculture, Roy Benett, a close collaborator of the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, was arrested.

Mugabe Tuesday in Harare chaired the weekly session of the council of ministers, in Tsvangirai’s absence and that of ministers from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition party that shares power with the ruling party as part of the agreement on power sharing.

Source: www.afriquejet.com

Mugabe’s moves stifle media plans

By Basildon Peta

It’s been a bad week for Zimbabwe’s embattled media. President Robert Mugabe appointed some of his top army cronies to run key state media bodies in what the Media Institute for Southern Africa has condemned as the “militarisation of the media”.

Zimbabwe’s arch-opportunist Jonathan Moyo, formerly the scourge of the media as information minister, then an independent, was readmitted into Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. And now, the government has issued a warning to Mail and Guardian owner Trevor Ncube not to launch his new Zimbabwean daily, Newsday, as planned, on November 1, without a licence. Yet the government is launching its own new newspapers without licences.

Mugabe has not yet appointed the new Zimbabwe Media Commission tasked with licensing newspapers, even though Parliament submitted the names of nominees to him two months ago. But the state-owned Zimbabwe Newspapers Group has since launched two new publications, The Midlands Chronicle and Harare Metro, without the required licences. This prompted Ncube to announce that he would launch Newsday on November 1 without a licence, since there was no commission to give him one.

But Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba, said the government would move fast to shut down Newsday if Ncube launched it without a licence. It would also arrest its staffers. “If you find yourself on the street without proper registration, ahh, you are inviting us and we will react instantly,” said Charamba to a meeting of editors in Harare this week.

These developments have dashed any hopes that the government of national unity launched by Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai in February would lead to media freedom, as it was supposed to under the Global Political Agreement the parties signed as the framework for the unity government.

Particularly ominous for the media is Moyo’s return. As minister of information he masterminded the closure of four independent newspapers. The printing press of the Daily News, the only independent daily, was bombed and destroyed in 2001 at a time when Moyo was warning it would be “obliterated”. If Moyo is co-opted into a Zanu-PF strategy team as widely speculated, journalists fear his influence will again be malevolent.

Journalists and politicians have widely condemned Mugabe’s appointments of retired army generals and brigadiers to the boards of Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings, which enjoys a monopoly over broadcasting; Zimbabwe Newspapers, which publishes all major state newspapers and the country’s only two dailies; and the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe, tasked with issuing broadcast frequencies.

Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, leader of the smaller MDC faction, has said the appointments of the boards would be reversed because they were irregular and unprocedural.

“Those appointments are null and void,” Mutambara said. “The cabinet was not consulted, the prime minister was not consulted… We are going to reverse them.” However, neither Mutambara nor Tsvangirai has been able to reverse any of Mugabe’s past decisions. – Independent Foreign Service

Mugabe Says Things in Zimbabwe are Just Fabulous

By Sarah Hager

President Robert Mugabe granted an interview to CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour today – his first interview with a Western news agency in years. Mugabe spoke to Amanpour while he was in New York attending the UN General Assembly meeting. The interview yielded many choice soundbites. Here are a few of my favorites:

He denied that Zimbabwe is in economic shambles, saying it grew enough food last year to feed all its people. Which is interesting because the World Food Program is busily feeding 1.8 million people in Zimbabwe and Malawi is busily selling maize to Zimbabwe because it needs to import food to feed its citizens.

In refuting criticisms leveled against his government’s policies by Bishop Desmond Tutu, Mugabe said  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the little man.” Hmmm. The Nobel Peace Prize committee might refute that assertion.

“Elections don’t go all that smoothly all the time in many countries,” he said. “Look what happens elsewhere. They didn’t go smoothly here, look at what happened during the first term of Bush.” Ok. Valid that elections don’t always go smoothly. However, if you are going to point specifically at the Bush/Gore contest as your comparative example, you might want to think again; because even though many of us were pretty darn unhappy with how things went down, there are some very stark differences between Zimbabwe in 2008 and the US in 2000.

First, not going “smoothly” is probably a pretty good description of events in the US whereas it masterfully understates events in Zimbabwe. In the time between the actual vote and the final determination of who won, people were not killed, tortured and sexually assaulted in the US in an attempt to create an atmosphere of political intimidation.

Second, our political stand off was resolved by the US Supreme Court and ended with a peaceful transfer of power (whether we wanted it or not). In Zimbabwe, Mugabe had his arm twisted into a power sharing agreement and then signed that agreement with his fingers crossed behind his back.

Now I’m not ever going to say that things are all sweetness and light and wonderful in the US, but I do think Mugabe could have come up with a slightly better comparison if he wanted to make a point that elections don’t always go “smoothly.”

You can watch the interview here and respond in our comments section with your favorite moments.

EU-Mugabe Meeting Fails to Resolve Sanctions Issue

By Ish Mufundikwa

President Robert Mugabe has met with a European Union delegation, the first such meeting since 2002 when the EU imposed sanctions on Mr. Mugabe and senior individuals in his party and government for alleged human rights abuses. The parties failed to agree on the lifting of sanctions as demanded by the Zimbabwean government.

President Mugabe emerged from the more than one hour meeting and told journalists the meeting was held in a friendly atmosphere but the sanctions issue had not been resolved. He said the EU demands that the Global Political Agreement that brought about the unity government be implemented are groundless.

” Everything that we were asked to do under the GPA we have done and done timeously even.  It is other matters of course that one might regard as constituting the spirit and environment in which the GPA should work which must now be attended to,” he said.

Mr. Mugabe blamed the sanctions for Zimbabwe’s long-running economic problems. When reminded that the sanctions targeted him and his inner circle he pointed out that he was still in power but the country’s ordinary people were suffering.

“Sanctions have had a real effect on the performance of our industries, mining manufacturing, we can’t get spare parts, we can’t get credit lines and we are blocked in regard to aid from the IMF and World Bank,” he said.

Sweden’s Development Minister Gunilla Carlsson, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, reiterated the EU stance that the sanctions are not against Zimbabwe. She said contacts with the Zimbabwean government will continue and the removal of the measures against Mr. Mugabe and others would depend on a number of issues being resolved.

“There are several and the implementation must now be conducted in a good way and we have discussed human rights violations, we have discussed the need for free media and some other things,” said Carlsson.

The EU team, which leaves Zimbabwe on Sunday, is still to meet with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Mr. Tsvangirai wants the removal of sanctions to be conditional on the full implementation of the deal that brought about the unity government.

EU meets Mugabe to ease tension with Zimbabwe

Zanu-PF confident about Bob’s longevity

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has returned to Harare from Dubai amid new rumours about his failing health.

The 86-year-old leader was reported to have been rushed to a clinic in Dubai on Sunday for treatment of prostate cancer.

This could not be confirmed, although it is known that Mugabe did fly to Dubai and to Hong Kong.

Official sources said Mugabe had commandeered an Air Zimbabwe aircraft for his journey.

Mugabe returned on Tuesday, but missed the burial of one of his key cronies, Richard Hove, at the National Heroes Acre on Tuesday. His absence fuelled speculation about his health.

Sources said he had travelled to Dubai and the Far East where his daughter Bona is enrolled at a university in Hong Kong.

The visit could, however, have been about re-instating his daughter in university after the holiday.

The sources said Mugabe often used such occasions to get a medical check-up, although usually in Malaysia where he has a personal doctor.

There are no indications that Mugabe is too ill to meet President Jacob Zuma, who is travelling to Harare on Thursday to meet all three leaders in the unity government to try to resolve problems among them which are frustrating the implementation of the government.

Mugabe’s Zanu-PF seems to be confident of his longevity: it has decided to retain him as leader at its five-yearly elective conference in December.

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