ZimInd editors report to Police Law and Order Section as police allege story about their [police] abuse of citizens violates the law. Zimbabwe Independent editors' Vincent Kahiya and Constantine Chimakure
on 11 May 2009 reported to the Zimbabwe Republic Police' Law and Order
Section, where they have spent almost the whole day. The two are
accompanied by their lawyer Innocent Chagonda.
At the
time of writing this alert, MISA-Zimbabwe was unable to establish an
update from telephone conversations with both Kahiya and Chagonda who
said that they were still at the police station and would be in touch
as soon as they were able to. They reported to the police station at
around 10am this morning. The summoning of the two by the police comes
at a time when the unity government of Zimbabwe has concluded a media
conference to discuss media reforms. Although the Unity government says
its intentions are to reform the media and allow more freedoms,
photojournalist Andrisson Manyere is currently languishing under police
guard at a Harare hospital and Kahiya and Chimakure have spent the
whole day at the police with a possibility that they might be detained.
The story that has landed the two in trouble relates to court papers in
which senior police and intelligence offices are named as having
abducted and having known the whereabouts of Manyere, Jestina Mukoko
and other political detainees abducted in 2008 and only produced in
court in December 2008. The police and the state including the Home
Affairs Minister, Zanu PFs Kembo Mohadi professed ignorance then, on
the whereabouts of the abductees. Court papers however show that they
knew all along. In a strange twist of events the same police now intend
to arrest the journalists who wrote the story alleging that publishing
the story violates the law. These developments have put into serious
doubt the capacity of the unity government to address human rights,
media and freedom of expression violations in Zimbabwe.
Background
On
Saturday 9 May, 2009 officials from the Law and Order Section visited
the Zimbabwe Independent offices looking for Kahiya and Chimakure over
a story published in this weeks edition naming members of the Central
Intelligence Organisation and police who were allegedly involved in the
abductions of human rights and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)
activists, amongst them freelance journalist Shadreck Andrisson Manyere
last year.
Manyere and the other activists are charged
under section 23 (1), (2) of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform)
Act which criminalises acts of insurgence, banditry, sabotage or
terrorism or alternatively Section 143 of the same Act which relates to
aggravating circumstances in relation to malicious damage to property.