[First published in AM New York]
ZIMBABWE GOES to the polls today. But one citizen’s vote will be missing.
He’s freelance journalist Cornelius Nduna (left), recently reported in MEDIA BEAT to be on the run from President Robert Mugabe‘s security men. Thankfully he’s reached safety in the neighboring country of Zambia.
Nduna incurred the president’s wrath by – what else? – reporting truthfully, along with three other reporters. Their technical offense? Reporting without a license, a crime in today’s Zimbabwe.
The others, working respectively for Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and The Times of London, escaped earlier this month through South Africa.
Zimbabwe’s dreaded Central Intelligence Office launched its special manhunt for Nduna because he had covertly videotaped Mugabe’s youth militias in training.
The footage aired internationally in a BBC documentary, “Secrets of the Camps,” revealing that young Mugabe supporters are taught electric-shock torture methods to use against their opponents.
Nduna’s reporting is especially significant given the intimidation widely expected during today’s vote. In the BBC film, a militia commander admits his trainees’ job is “to keep the opposition out of power.”
Full disclosure: I once campaigned journalistically for Robert Mugabe’s release from cruel political detention in what was then Rhodesia And I was thrown out of the country by the white supremacists who had imprisoned him.
Nowadays, I can scarcely say how sickening it is to see Mugabe treat the press, and the rest of his country’s democratic institutions, with such vicious contempt.
BUT IT MAKES YOU GLAD, doesn’t it, to live in a country where journalists aren’t persecuted or put in jail?
Hold on, though. Maybe we should check with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times.
Both reporters face 18 months’ jail-time for refusing to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. His mandate: hunting down the Bush administration’s in-house source for the public exposure of ClA employee Valerie Plame.
But mystery remains about the original publisher of the leak, columnist Robert Novak. Why is he not similarly threatened? Absent any comment from Novak himself, two possible explanations are circulating. One is that Novak took the Fifth Amendment on grounds he might incriminate himself, though what crime could be involved is unclear. The other is that he told the Special Prosecutor who his source was.
I asked Cooper and Miller’s lawyer, the preeminent First Amendment expert, Floyd Abrams, which theory he favored. His answer: “I think he talked. We must presume Novak said who gave him the information.”
But if that is true, why is Fitzgerald still pursuing Cooper and Miller?
And I thought Zimbabwean authority was arbitrary.
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