Those are not our Prisons – Chinamasa
Justice and Legal Affairs Minister Patrick Chinamasa has dismissed an SABC TV3 Special Assignment documentary which aired horrifying footage exposing how prisons in the country have become death camps for thousands of inmates who are deprived of food and medical care.
The documentary, shown on Tuesday’s night on South Africa’s state broadcaster SABC3, documented the “living hell” for prisoners at Beitbridge, Khami and Chikurubi Maximum prisons.
Chinamasa told local media that the documentary, which showed horrifying pictures of gravely ill inmates, was ‘false’ and accused the SABC team of fabricating the story.
“What was shown by the SABC3 is not true,” said Chinamasa. “The SABC is lying. We do not allow cameras into our prisons. We have made investigations and found out that the footage is not from Zimbabwean but other countries,” he said.
“The pictures shown are not from Zimbabwe prisons but elsewhere in Africa and these are being attributed to us. We know our prisons are facing challenges but that documentary was false. Also it is unethical for the SABC to show such pictures of foreign prisoners and attribute them to Zimbabwe. I want to re-state that no-one is allowed inside our prisons with cameras,” he said.
But the SABC team said the film, made by SABC’s Special Assignment programme, was shot over three months with cameras smuggled into the prisons.
The film showed how prison staff have converted cells and storage rooms to “hospital wards” for the dying and makeshift mortuaries, where bodies “rot on the floors with maggots moving all around”. In the footage inmates could be heard speaking in Shona and Ndebele-Zimbabwe ‘s national languages.
However Senator Roy Bennett, the deputy agriculture minister-designate, who spent one month in a Mutare jail confirmed the authenticity of the footage.
“Those pictures are real, if not rather conservative pictures. The conditions in the prison I was in in Mutare were far worse images than that,” he said.
“There are images of people in what used to be called penal blocks, where if you misbehave within the prison system you are put into that block as an individual. And there are five people in those.
“At any one stage there is at least one person there who is unable to move around. He is on a drip during the day, the drip is taken off during the night because they are locked up. And basically they are dying.”
Despite the denials from Chinamasa, Deputy Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs Jessie Majome, acknowledged that there was a serious humanitarian crisis in all Zimbabwe’s prisons and appealed for aid.
Late last year seven inmates at Mutimurefu prison in Masvingo died of hunger related diseases,after the government reversed a food aid ban.
Zimbabwe Prison Services (ZPS) public relations manager, Gransinia Masango confirmed the deaths then but denied that they died because of hunger
“It is true that some prisoners in Masvingo died, but not of hunger. I was informed that they were already ill,” said Masango.
Additional Reporting by Radio Vop
Posted by Wellington Chadehumbe
on April 3, 2009. Filed under Local News.
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