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Mugabe cracks down on journalists, Zimbabwe Elections

My prayer for courageous Zimbabwean journalists



imageTonight my thoughts take me to faraway Zimbabwe, where media reports indicate that riot police are out in full force. The eerie five-day silence from the Robert Mugabe-led government ended today with a sudden crackdown as police began raiding Harare hotels. Police raided the Meikles Hotel, hunting down members of the Movement for Democratic Change said to have won Saturday’s national elections. Riot police who surrounded the York Lodge Hotel, housing foreign journalists, took several of them away and imprisoned them.

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But it is the handful of courageous Zimbabwe-based journalists, who have been filing stories to Canada Free Press (CFP) and others since 2002, that I most worry about. If Zimbabwean police would dare to take New York Times, Pulitzer prize-winning correspondent Barry Bearak into custody, how would Zimbabwe’s poverty-stricken journalists fare? If they are swallowed up in the current crackdown, and go missing will anybody know? None of the courageous Zimbabwean journalists, some of who have been filing to CFP for six years has been in touch since Tuesday. These are the men and women who first got the news outside their country that it looked like Morgan Tsvangirai had won the election. Reporting from inside of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe cannot be easy. These reporters are writing from a country where 80 percent of the population—including them--is living on less than a dollar a day. One of them, whose name isn’t divulged for obvious reasons, has been filing columns to CFP since the days when Mugabe first ordered the violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms. How could anyone have known then that the farms would be given to Mugabe’s relatives, friends and cronies who allowed once cultivated fields to be run over by weeds? Who could have known then that the entire country would face starvation? Who could have predicted that local veterinarians, sickened by their task, would have to kill off most of the pet population, as their owners couldn’t possibly feed them; that the livestock of the fields would be no more? For years the Zimbawean journalist moved from place to place, using computers with Internet connections wherever he could find them. The harder life got in Zimbabwe, the harder it got for him. Difficult to scrape up the energy to keep moving when there is no food and shelter to help you along the way. He once summoned flagging energies to send out a cry for help to the outside media, asking even for the smallest of compensation. When his requests failed, he dispatched another email saying he would continue trying to file reports “for the sake of journalism”. “My hope lies in people in the outside world caring about what is happening to my country,” he wrote. His writings continued to chronicle the hardships in a country where a third of the population now depends on imported food handouts; another third has fled the county and where 80 percent has no jobs. Inflation in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent even after Mugabe brought in Chinese investment. People there are suffering crippling shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine. Throughout all of this, life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 35. Even as police were raiding hotels, insiders in the ruling ZANU-PF party confirmed Thursday that Mugabe and his top advisers will hold a Politburo meeting on Friday to decide what to do next. Sources in the ZANU-PF told the Christian Monitor that Mugabe’s coterie are already mobilizing members of their youth militia and so-called war veterans—both of whom are personally loyal to Mugabe and have received confiscated white-owned farms in return for their loyalty—to beat up people, particularly in rural areas. Their goal is to prevent people from casting votes in favour of the opposite candidate in a runoff. In a story written by their own journalists, everything but the indomitable human spirit has been killed off by the Mugabe government in a once flourishing Zimbabwe. Against the most incredible of odds, courageous Zimbabwean journalists have always got the word out to the outside world. God protect every one of them.


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Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

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