A six-months pregnant journalist with the state controlled national daily, The Herald, Paidamowo Chipunza, was on 2 March 2011 assaulted while on duty by an assailant who boasted being related to a director with the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).Chipunza, a senior health reporter, was punched in the stomach and slapped by Ignatius Zuze while she was following up on the water problems at Harare Central Hospital. Zuze who is a student nurse, also turned on photographer Innocent Makawa and damaged his camera.
He was arrested on allegations of assaulting the journalists and damaging a company vehicle and camera. According to The Herald, Zuze admitted assaulting the journalists saying they had photographed him without his consent.
On why he had attacked a pregnant woman, he reportedly said: We are equal. That is what they call gender equality. She is just like anyone else.
He boasted that nothing would happen to him as his uncle was a CIO director and that the journalists were going to lose their jobs.
MISA-Zimbabwe position
MISA-Zimbabwe condemns the assault of the journalists and finds it galling that the assailant could not restrain himself from attacking a pregnant woman.
This underlines some of the extra-legal hindrances to free journalism enterprise. These violations of media freedom have been engendered by a culture of impunity where several cases involving attacks on journalists especially those working for the independent media by political party activists, have largely been ignored by the authorities.
While MISA-Zimbabwe commends the police for arresting the accused nurse, they should go the extra mile and investigate and arrest other enemies of the media accused of harassing journalists working for the independent media and those fingered in the destruction of independent newspapers and bombings of media houses.
Only this week, alleged ZANU PF supporters reportedly destroyed copies of the privately owned NewsDay newspaper and harassed its vendors ahead of the launch by President Robert Mugabe of the anti-sanctions campaign in Harare.
No action has been taken against the culprits or those accused of engaging in similar illegal conduct last month. Equally, no progress has been reported on investigations pertaining to the torching of a vehicle carrying copies of the privately-owned Zimbabwean in 2008, the bombings of The Daily News offices in 2000, its printing press in 2001and Radio VOP offices in 2002.
The polices prompt response to attacks on The Herald journalists and their seeming failure to act on a catalogue of similar cases involving the private media only casts them as partisan and selectively enforcing the law.
Post published in: Politics