New York Times
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Published: February 8, 1999
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 6— In an angry televised address, the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, pushed his country toward a constitutional crisis this weekend.
The President suggested that the Supreme Court resign, threatened ”stern measures” against the independent press and appeared to support the army’s arrest and apparent torture of two journalists and to defy court orders that they be released.
He also suggested that the article that led to the arrests — which said that 23 army officers had been arrested for plotting a coup — had been planted by British agents. And although the two journalists for The Zimbabwe Standard who wrote the Jan. 10 article are black, he accused white journalists and rights activists of plotting against him and warned that ”they have pushed our sense of racial tolerance to the limit.”
Mr. Mugabe was reacting to a Jan. 25 letter from three Supreme Court justices. It asked that the President ”confirm that the rule of law is accepted as a necessary ingredient of a democratic Zimbabwe.”
It also asked that he confirm that the army has no power to arrest civilians and that the Government would not tolerate torture, and to reassure the judiciary that the Government would act in accordance with Zimbabwe’s Constitution.
In his reply, which was shown on state television Saturday night and again this morning, Mr. Mugabe angrily defended the army’s actions, saying it had been horrified by the article. ”Propelled by the unquestionable loyalty and commitment to the defense and security of the state, they wanted to establish the source of the falsehood and so they proceeded in the manner they did,” Mr. Mugabe said, according to an Agence France-Presse account.
The two journalists, Ray Choto and Mark Chavanduka, said they were tortured with electric shocks applied to their genitals by intelligence officers demanding the names of their sources. The Defense Ministry dismissed them as liars, but a doctor who examined them said they had been tortured.
”If The Standard had not behaved in such a blatantly dishonest and unethical manner, the army would not have acted the way they did,” Mr. Mugabe said.
He accused the judges of ”an outrageous and deliberate act of impudence.”
He accused the paper’s two white publishers of running an untrue article to plant the idea of a coup in the army’s head. He also criticized two human rights activists, Mike Auret of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, and David Coltart, a human rights lawyer.
Mr. Coltart was quoted as saying today that ”to all intents and purposes, this is now a military regime.”
A version of this article appeared in print on February 8, 1999, on page A3 of the New York edition.