By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

EFFECTIVE teaching of the history of white racist sanctions on Zimbabwe will have to include the accurate documentation of significant media lies written, spoken or published against the country and the people. 

Otherwise, all the false perceptions founded upon those lies will linger on forever.

On  February 20 2008, Al Jazeera aired a cut-and-paste documentary called Inside Zimbabwe on its Witness programme.  

The documentary followed the same pattern set by the EU, the US, the British and the MDC in that it used the same strategy of describing and exaggerating the common effects of sanctions upon the people of Zimbabwe in order to portray genocide-like conditions while never mentioning sanctions and the Western policy of economic strangulation of the same people.  

Only ZANU-PF corruption and mismanagement were blamed as causes.

Al Jazeera’s Witness mixed up the effects of HIV-AIDS, effects of drought, effects of land reform, effects of SAPs, effects of slum clearance and effects of sanctions in order to reach several conclusions or impressions:

• That life expectancy in Zimbabwe was the lowest on earth and down to 34 years: This was a lie.

• That all the food and means of livelihood left in Zimbabwe derived from Zimbabwean migrants working abroad and sending money back home.  This too was a lie.

• That land redistribution and agrarian reform had been an absolute disaster and that there was no African farming taking place in the whole country. This was a lie.

• That all these alleged genocide-like conditions had been caused by ZANU-PF through corruption, mismanagement and an unnecessary land revolution.

The Inside Zimbabwe documentary was fraudulent in many ways, including the fact that it showed footage from dry areas of Matebeleland (suitable for goats and donkeys) in order to ‘prove’ that land reform had killed farming!  

This documentary meant that by 2008 Al Jazeera had joined that regime change bandwagon. 

The bandwagon had started rolling with the sanctions in 2000.

In late 2000, Megabuck magazine and other neo-colonial papers adopted the New Labour line that the Government of Zimbabwe would be ousted unconstitutionally by Christmas.  

This claim was credited to the newly formed and foreign-sponsored Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).  

The Megabuck article was entitled ‘Zimbabwe Doomed’ and it occupied the cover of the paper.  

This constituted media terror because it announced doom for an entire people and it blamed that doom upon the liberation movement in Government which was portrayed as an evil to be discarded without any regard for peaceful and constitutional means to get rid of it. And yet, that movement and Government was certain to win any free and fair election for the foreseeable future.  So these media were, in fact, inviting the people to stage a coup d’etat and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai eventually said this out loud and clear, with fanfare from the usual press. 

And the point was that any nation described as doomed was a nation marked for extinction.   

So Megabuck was trying to prepare both the citizens of Zimbabwe and the outside world to accept what Zimbabwe’s enemies were wishing and planning against the nation — doom.

On  February 21 2001 The Daily News put a date to Morgan Tsvangirai’s call to oust the liberation movement in Government by violent means.  

It announced that this would happen by July 1 2001. ‘Mugabe out by July’, cried the headline.

The next month, March 2001, Norman Reynolds put articles on the internet and in South African papers which further sought to terrify and terrorise the people.  

He claimed that by July 2001, there would be no bread, no mealie meal, no fuel, nothing in Zimbabwe.  

This would lead to the collapse of the country unless people overthrew the Government before such a collapse.

Reynolds continued his campaign into January 2002. 

He argued that SADC armies should occupy Zimbabwe or at least conduct war games on Zimbabwe’s borders in order to influence the population to vote against ZANU-PF and elect the MDC in the 2002 Presidential elections.  

These articles were, in fact, echoing actual British intentions to invade Zimbabwe which were later confirmed by former South African President Thabo Mbeki and some British generals.

The year 2003 was to be much worse than 2002.  

Amani Trust, the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition and a strange outfit called ‘Genocide Watch’ worked together to produce a big document called: ‘Is Genocide Imminent in Zimbabwe?’ They proceeded to answer their own question by saying there would be genocide in Zimbabwe by January 2003 and that this genocide would be far worse than the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The Swedish journalist, Torbjorn Bjorkman, who, in 2007, visited Zimbabwe, confirmed that the terror documents predicting genocide in Zimbabwe by January 2003 were widely circulated in Europe where they generated many stories.

But when the genocide failed to happen, the same groups and media who had predicted it started to agitate for a national uprising called ‘The Final Push’ which would oust Government from power unconstitutionally.  

‘The Final Push’ was organised in June 2003 and it flopped miserably.

Other expressions of media terror in 2003 included the following:

“100 000 may die: Starvation stalks Matabeleland South,” The Daily News, July 21.

Then, on  September 5 2003, the now disgraced Catholic Bishop Pius Ncube used various media to claim there was rampant rape and torture of citizens in Zimbabwe perpetrated by youth militias and by the ruling ZANU-PF.  

These media fabrications seemed intended to fill the embarrassing void created by the false predictions of massive genocide which was supposed to happen in January 2003 and a ‘Final Push’ to crown MDC victory in June of the same year.

On September 9 2003 South African paper The Sunday Argus extended Bishop Ncube’s terror lies to other bishops in South Africa who came out allegedly calling for a coup d’etat to end the misery of the people of Zimbabwe.  

By October 23, the lies had assumed a new dimension. It was alleged in South African and British media that the people of Zimbabwe were dying of starvation and Britain, which was waging an economic and propaganda war on the Government of Zimbabwe, had nonetheless pledged enough funds to feed half of the whole population of this country!  

Likewise, even if there were no corpses on the streets of Zimbabwean cities, if foreign parliaments moved motions to indict President Robert Mugabe for genocide, then the genocide would somehow become real. 

That is what happened on October 9 2003 when both AFP and SAPA reported a motion in the Canadian Federal Parliament to indict the President of Zimbabwe for crimes against humanity and for genocide. 

The vilification campaign was extended to Paris, New York and Washington DC, with the Daily News here faithfully following and reporting it, for instance on February 20 and 21 July 2003.  

In other words, the false prediction of genocide taking place in January 2003 led to calls for Mugabe to be put on trial for genocide anyway, even if it had happened only in the media.

By February 2004, the local and global media had failed to find any bodies in Zimbabwe anywhere close to those that littered Rwanda in 1994.  

So the liar’s camera had to find an alternative object.

The BBC’s Hilary Anderson made a very brave attempt in this regard when she staged a video in South Africa claiming to depict the insides of Zimbabwe’s National Youth Training Programme.  

She called the video ‘Secrets of the Camps.  

While a little of the footage was borrowed from Zimbabwe, the bulk of it was staged in South Africa.  Anderson augmented her video fiction with articles, including one on  February 28 called ‘Zimbabwe’s torture camps’.

Similar terror tapes were forged and smuggled to the UN Human Rights Commission and rejected because they seemed either to implicate the camera person as a participant in the violence or to suggest a total fake.