REPORTING AT GUNPOINT
Comment
Is there freedom of the press in this Monarchical Democracy of ours? Are reporters allowed to go about their lawful business without harassment from law enforcers and government agents?
In a shocking incident that will no doubt make the next human rights reports on Swaziland, a plain-clothed police officer pointed his handgun at Senior Photojournalist of the Times SUNDAY Walter Dlamini (who is about as humble and mild-mannered as a man can be) for taking photographs of his colleagues holding and beating a protester behind a police van, demanding that he delete the pictures. Surely the police are taught the first and most basic fire safety rule; do not point a gun at a person unless you mean to shoot. If not, this is criminal negligence. If so, this is harassment and intimidation of the highest order, an implicit threat to the life of the journalist.
This sorry excuse for a police officer had reason to be worried; he and his colleagues were caught in the act assaulting a protestor who was manifestly not being threatening but was obviously being ‘punished’; being struck on the knee (where permanent damage could occur) with a heavy wooden truncheon by one uniformed brute while two others held him and another watched from a short distance, truncheons dangling in readiness from their hands.
The casual work-a-day savagery of these police officers and their sense of entitlement to brutalising Swazi citizens with impunity goes a long way to explaining why they would attack with teargas and batons what was a peaceful protest march before their intervention; once again proving the police are responsible for much of the violence that erupts during protests.
The protesters may not have been in the right to disagree with the election results from Gege, but they certainly had a right to complain about it and their right to life and safety should trump the legal necessity of getting a permit to protest.
Those officers responsible for this violent assault on the Constitutional Rights of the public and the press must be brought to book publicly, and soon, or our peaceful image as a nation will be proved a sham.
Robbing the dead
As if police barbarism wasn’t enough, the Times SUNDAY headlined the common-place theft of body parts (and even water used to wash the corpses) from the Raleigh Fitkin Memorial Hospital morgue and private funeral parlours, such as Zenzeleni in Manzini, as employees of these institutions sold them to be used for magic.
The only pathologist in the country, Dr Komma Reddy, noted that he often attended corpses with pieces that had already been removed, while one hospital morgue worker explained the lengths they would have to go to in order to deceive relatives on the look-out for such thefts. “It is much easier to remove parts of the internal organs, like fat,” he noted, saying it was easier to steal human organs when there was a post-mortem.
This despicable crime needs to be punished with the utmost severity by the law – even the ancient 1889 Law that covers this crime provides for life in prison for organ robbers. But maybe the police will be too busy threatening journalists.




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