Scribe arrested in Chiadzwa

ANNIE Mpalume, a free lance journalist, was last week arrested in the Chiadzwa diamond fields on allegations of entering a protected area without a pass.

She was filming and taking photographs in the diamond fields. Mpalume has since been freed on bail.

“I am, of course, very happy to be free,” Mpalume told The Zimbabwe Times in a telephone interview. She said she was only now learning of a media support campaign on her behalf while she was held by police.

She said she was on tour of duty when she was arrested.

“We were shooting in Chiadzwa when we got caught by police officers and soldiers,” she said. “They said it was a restricted area.”

She said she did not suffer any harassment or beatings by her captors. Army officials stationed in the diamond fields have been accused of using high-handed tactics to deal with people found loitering in the fields without authorisation.

“I am fine,” Mpalume said, adding the officers firstly confiscated her footage but she eventually managed to retrieve it.

“At the end of the ordeal, they gave me back the footage and warned me not to enter restricted areas again,” she said.

Mpalume was on October 8 arrested in the diamond fields near the country’s eastern border with Mozambique on allegations of entering a protected area without a pass.

She was arrested as she was filming and taking photographs in the fields where the Zimbabwe army and police are facing accusations of mass murder in a fierce crackdown on illegal diamond mining.

Mpalume, an accredited photojournalist with the now defunct statutory Media and Information Commission (MIC), was initially detained overnight in Chiadzwa following her arrest before she was transferred to Mutare Central Police Station.

She was detained there. She finally appeared in court in Mutare on October 12 and was granted US$30 bail by the presiding Magistrate, who remanded her out of custody to October 26.

Mpalume becomes the second journalist to be arrested in the controversial diamond fields.

In the recent past years, the former ZBC Manicaland bureau chief Andrew Neshamba lost his job for having aided a journalist from South Africa’s e-TV to do a documentary recording of the activities at Chiadzwa without clearance.

Journalists have taken an active interest in the Chiadzwa story where government sent in the army and intelligence officers after local police were accused of taking bribes from illegal miners, known locally as magweja and magwejerina, and failing to keep law and order in the area.

Army units have marched on homes of people suspected of profiting from the illegal diamond trade, seizing property.

The full extent of the diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe became clear following discoveries made in June 2006. The diamond fields are possibly the world’s biggest.

The finds were made by British prospecting firm African Consolidated Resources (ACR). It had just taken over the rights to explore the area from De Beers, which had failed to renew its mining licences despite having found diamonds before 2006.

In September 2006, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF government reneged on its deal with ACR and seized back the mining rights to the region.

Amid public confusion over ownership, a diamond rush began. Over 10,000 illegal artisanal miners invaded the site and began working small plots. But by January 2007, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, warned that the country was losing up to US$50 million a week through gold and diamond smuggling.

The response of both the police and, in particular, the army to bring their interests under control was brutal. Launching Operation Hakudzokwi or No Return in October 2008, the army ordered a shoot-on-sight policy, killing hundreds of illegal miners.

Men were strafed by helicopter gunship, and a cordon was set up around the diamond fields. As many as 10,000 villagers living near the fields were relocated 15 miles away.

And naturally this became a big news story for hacks.

Mpalume said her forays into the Chiadzwa diamond fields by subterfuge were aimed at exposing what exactly was transpiring in the bloody diamond fields. - Zimbabwe Times