By Tafataona Mahoso

THE forces behind the rushed sponsorship of court cases to make criminal defamation unconstitutional and limit libel to a civil offence are the same forces behind the current campaign to disparage and trash President Robert Mugabe’s successful public diplomacy.
The main strategy for trashing Zimbabwe’s new projection is to focus on the alleged price while denying the value of the President’s diplomatic efforts.
The criminal defamation of President Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s entire leadership over the last 17 years gave rise to the glib assumption that Zimbabwe was now a permanently isolated nation which former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labelled and dismissed as “an outpost of tyranny.”
It is therefore not surprising that the panic over the President’s successful public diplomacy is being voiced by Western sponsored media just as the court case against criminal defamation has been filed purely from the point of view of NGOs, journalists and editors, leaving out the historical experience of criminal defamation of the people and the nation over the last 17 years and denying majority views from the nationwide 2009-2010 outreach leading to the writing of the current Constitution of Zimbabwe.
The prominence of NGOs, journalists and editors in pushing to make criminal defamation law unconstitutional as well as in the panic over President Mugabe’s successful public diplomacy are not a coincidence since the expected isolation which the President’s public diplomacy has ended was itself orchestrated by NGOs, journalists and editors in the first place.
What is at stake for Madzimbahwe is the fact that every nation has the right within international law to design, position, control and deploy the means through which it can communicate its true collective integrity, national identity, national unity, independence, sovereignty and public morale to its local constituencies as well as to its external publics.
The various features of this communicated public posture include public diplomacy, public affairs, cultural exchange, trade agreements and security and solidarity arrangements. On 22 August 2002 British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that his New Labour government was frustrated over its failure to reverse Zimbabwe’s land revolution. As a result, the British state had taken three steps:
engineering and promoting the total isolation of Zimbabwe beginning with that nation’s suspension from the Commonwealth and from participation in the IMF and World Bank
initiating wider economic sanctions against the country; and
convincing the United States and the European Union also to sanction and isolate Zimbabwe.
That same month of August 2002, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kanesteiner gave a press briefing in Washington DC where he announced that the US and its allies would be using “independent” media houses, “independent” journalists and editors, civil society organisations and elements within the South African state, the Botswana government and SADC institutions to assist the Anglo-Saxon powers in effecting regime change in Zimbabwe.
While the total isolation of Zimbabwe was never achieved, the defamation and demonisation did succeed until now:
By agreeing to be used by the Anglo-Saxon powers to reverse the legacy of the African liberation movement led by President Mugabe, journalists, NGO and the MDC formations became purveyors of a creeping “know-nothing” culture whose objective was to recolonise the African mind through “terror by forgetting” and through the “free-flow of lies”. Zimbabweans were suddenly confronted by an opposition movement and media sector characterised by media banditry, intellectual hooliganism and intolerance sponsored by the former colonial power.
First a web of lies had to be spun to justify illegal and racist sanctions, imposed by white racist nations only, against Zimbabwe.
Second, another web of media lies had to be spun to make the people of Zimbabwe believe that the destruction of their livelihoods concurrent with the sanctions had nothing to do with the same sanctions.
Third, yet another layer of lies had to be developed to say that the sanctions did not constitute real economic warfare but just travel bans and “restrictive measures”.
Fourth, when it became clear that the majority of the people knew that the sanctions were real and they really hurt, yet another layer of lies had to be created to argue that the now real sanctions were doing so much good that they needed to be “calibrated” (in the words of David Miliband) or “staggered” (in the words of Morgan Tsvangirai).
The defamation and demonisation of Zimbabwe over the last 17 years was an integral part of the continuing defamation and demonisation of Africa, since it was Africa and the voters of Zimbabwe whom the Anglo-Saxon powers always blamed for their failure to effect illegal regime change in Zimbabwe.
What President Mugabe has now achieved is to link the real voice of the majority of Zimbabwe with the rest of Africa. This has caused panic because the infamy and bad image of Zimbabwe which NGOs and journalists had almost globalised has now been turned inside out with the President’s ascendancy as Chairman of both SADC and the African Union.
The 17 years of negative publicity mean that no-one around the world has to spend time asking who this President of Zimbabwe is who is also leading the SADC region and Africa. The only thing that has to be learned now is the fact that the demonisation and defamation of Zimbabwe and President Robert Mugabe were based on lies and distortions. So the so-called “watch-dogs” along the Anglo-Saxon conveyer-belt of lies are in panic and they fear that their smear campaigns could become more than discredited.
They could be punished – – from the fabricated Daily News lie about Brandina Tadyanemhandu in Magunje to the 2002 false report about imminent genocide in Zimbabwe and the 25 or more Internet sites deployed by the Baba Jukwa gang. Its authors and editors could actually be punished one day if the law of criminal defamation remains law or is stiffened.
We know that the people of Zimbabwe would want criminal defamation law to remain from the following recent surveys:
What the People Said: A Report of the National Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment of a New Democratic Constitution, volumes I and II, 29 November 1999.
Media Professionalism and Ethics in Zimbabwe:
A Report Based on the Inquiry Carried Out By the Media Ethics Committee, 2002
National Survey of Broadcasting in Zimbabwe: A Report Based on a Survey Carried Out by the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe, July to September 2003.
The latest and most comprehensive data was collected by the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution, COPAC. Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans, including all the leaders of all the political parties, are fully aware of what the people said about the media in general and criminal defamation in particular.