Zimbabwe's Diamond Torture Camps : Fact or Fiction?

The sudden discovery of torture camps in one's country is a chilling, spine freezing experience for anyone who loves their country as much as I do. I was concerned.

I rushed to the BBC website and read the BBC online article, and another by The Guardian. There are no substantive facts presented in either article. All they do is rehash long running gossip, rumours and urban legends about Marange and try and present that as if it were some earth shattering discovery.

At one time a major Western newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, published an internet urban legend as fact claiming that an Air Zimbabwe pilot locked himself out of the cockpit and had to hack down the door with an axe. http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/fireaxe.asp. This is the same kind of hatchet job journalism we are witnessing here.

The truth of the matter is that ever since the discovery of Marange diamonds a lot of colourful rumours and gossip have been swirling around relating to them.

I am surprised the BBC program did not mention the stories of diamond poachers (colloquial known as magweja) skinning each other alive, to extract stones from those who may have swallowed them. Nor the ones about a villager from the area feeding his cattle exclusively on cabbages trucked in everyday. There are other urban legends about villagers installing expensive TV's in their chicken runs so that the feathered ones could watch.

The BBC has selected only some of these rumours and colourful claims that are negative for the government and tried to present them as fact. If you ask me that is gutter journalism, bad enough to make News of the World journalists seem like saintly friars.

For example the claim that detainees where whipped 120 times a day simply doesn't hold water, unless of course they were being whipped by one year old toddlers. If that was true there would be hundreds of people with scars to bear the testimony and probably numerous deaths as well. Being given 10 lashes by a strong man let alone 120 is not easy for the human body to endure.

My major concern is that this kind of negativism about Zimbabwe rubs off on the rest of us, not just those attacked.

It is ordinary Zimbabweans who eventually face xenophobic attacks from hosts who have negative perceptions about them. It is ordinary Zimbabweans who face deportations and other difficulties because of negative perceptions about their country. It is ordinary Zimbabweans who face all kinds of discrimination wherever they go because of negative perceptions.