Harare ‘inciting hatred’ Times (UK) Date posted:Fri 19-Dec-2003 Date published:Fri 19-Dec-2003
Back to previous page		The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and the Herald daily had been accomplices in “the theft of a nation’s democratic rights” and “accomplices to murder” over the past three years From Jan Raath in Harare Zimbabwe's state-run media are whipping up hatred and violence in a way that echoes Rwanda radio in the genocide there, according to a report. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and the Herald daily had been accomplices in “the theft of a nation’s democratic rights” and “accomplices to murder” over the past three years, the report said. As in Rwanda in 1994, when Libre des Milles Collines radio - known as “Radio Machete” - beamed anti-Tutsi propaganda, journalists in the state media had “abandoned the most elementary standards of truthfulness” to create stories that “seemed calculated to incite a violent response to the Government’s opponents”, according to the report by the local Media Monitoring Project. “No longer is it adequate to say they are politically biased,” it added. The 203-page report is the first to dissect the controlled campaign of incitement to violence that has successfully instilled a climate of “fear and panic” to buttress President Mugabe’s dictatorship. At least every half hour, state radio broadcasts a jingle urging Zimbabweans to adopt “liberation” values and repeats the word “war” five times. The state media had made no attempt to report reality. Their aim was to “fire up” a hard core of ruling party militants against the opposition, as Radio Machete mobilised a relatively small group of Hutus to genocide, the report said. This month the International Criminal Court for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, passed life sentences on two of the station’s journalists and a 35-year sentence on another. It was the first time since the Nuremberg trials that journalists had been convicted of crimes against humanity. “The Zimbabwean echo is so uncanny, it would hardly be surprising to find a copy of the (Radio Machete) manual on Jonathan Moyo’s (the Information Minister) bookshelf,” the report said. “When, one day, the perpetrators of violence are held to account, those who incited them with ‘hate speech’ should not be forgotten.” The media issued a barrage of reports and commentaries that hammer out the myth of a British conspiracy to overthrow Mr Mugabe and return the country to white rule.