A Rare Personal Story from Zimbabwe

To the Western world, the continuing elections conflict in Zimbabwe may seem distant and prolonged. Almost one month after the March 29 elections between current President Robert Mugabe of ZANU-PF, and Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) a winner has not yet been declared. Day after day, riots break out in the streets between the two rival parties.

In Zimbabwe, journalism without accreditation is against the law and results in jail time. Barry Bearak, a foreign news correspondent for The New York Times, covered the elections conflict in Zimbabwe in secret for months. To avoid legal consequences, Bearak would enter Zimbabwe as a tourist, interview sources in private, and destroy all of his notes before returning to Johannesburg, South Africa (where he is based with his family) to file his story with the Times.

One day, however, the Zimbabwean authorities caught Bearak in the midst of a story in the city of Harare, and arrested him, along with a British journalist from The Sun Telegraph. His April 27 story “In Zimbabwe Jail: A Reporter’s Ordeal” details his thirteen day stay in a Harare prison. He vividly describes the poor cell conditions, which included acrid stench and limited food. More importantly, Bearak offers the untold story of the other inmates in the Harare prison. Many were jailed without allowing being allowed to notify their families. Others committed seemingly miniscule crimes such a “cutting the hindquarter off a deer that had been hit by a bus.” Bearark’s narrative allows the Western reader to see the despair of the starving Zimbabwean people—instead of characterizing them as political parties or “opposition forces” as CNN, the AP, Reuters, and other news sources do.

For journalists, Bearak’s account hits home hard. The words of the Zimbabwean authorities who arrested Bearak, “You’ve been gathering, processing, and disseminating the news,” virtually fit the job description of a Western journalist to a tee. However, the journalistic barrier of Zimbabwe’s law makes conveying the accurate truth near impossible. Journalists are required to produce stories “approved” by the Mugabe administration, an extreme form of censorship.

While Bearak’s vivid narrative of the Harare prison is informative and thought provoking, he was extremely lucky to be have been afforded a great public defender along with a relatively expedient and just trial. Thousands of Zimbabweans are not as fortunate. One can only hope that other news sources follow the Times lead and produce more first-person encounters of the tumultuous situation in Zimbabwe. Polarizing the elections conflict into ZANU-PF versus MDC, will inevitably lead to the desensitization of the Western audience, leaving the stories of the Zimbabwean people forgotten.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/africa/27bearak.html?scp=2&sq=zimbabwe&st=nyt

- Theodora Stringham