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South
Africa is synonymous with crime in the eyes of many--as evidenced by the recent
mugging of a TV crew live on camera--but for the press, a more sinister
threat to freedom lies in the growing number of cases where it is the police,
in flagrant denial of their orders, who intimidate and threaten journalists,
forcing them to delete photographs of police on the job.
The
latest incident took place on a street outside the parliamentary precinct in
Cape Town on March 11, a few hours before President Jacob Zuma was due to
answer questions from members of Parliament (MPs) in response to his state of
the nation address given a month earlier.
A
parliamentary reporter at Media24 newspapers, Jan Gerber, told CPJ that he was
outside the precinct when he saw a group of men gathered near the offices of
the police VIP Protection Unit. The unit is responsible for the protection of
the president, his deputy, cabinet ministers, and provincial ministers.
Gerber
said the men were dressed in their usual plainclothes: white shirts and black
trousers, the same dress code of security officers who were called into the
national assembly controversially on February 12 during the annual opening of
Parliament.
Events
on February 12 included the violent removal of opposition MPs from the house by
security officials because they were disrupting the president's state of the nation address
(SONA) and the jamming of cellphone signals, which journalists and
opposition MPs protested until service was restored.
The events provoked a
burst of outrage on social media under the hashtag #SONA2015
as well as reams of critical editorial copy questioning what was happening to the
country's 20-year-old democracy.
Editors condemned the fact that the official television feed from the national assembly stayed
focused on the speaker of Parliament whilst pandemonium reigned in the house.
The reality of what was happening in the chamber was captured on cellphones by journalists in the press gallery.
It
was against this backdrop that the group of security guards outside Parliament
caught Gerber's eye, he told CPJ. "They were wearing white shirts and they
were standing under the police flag, so I took the picture," Gerber told
CPJ. "Two of them crossed the road to ask me why I was taking photographs,
then three others came over and tried to grab my camera. I resisted. They
pushed me down and tried to take me into their offices. I refused, and they
told me to delete my photographs, which I did. Then they let me go."
Gerber
said Media24 staffers were able to recover some of the photographs from the memory card. These
were used the next day in one of Media24's titles, the daily,
Afrikaans-language Die Burger. Gerber told CPJ he had laid charges of
assault and intimidation with the South African police on March 16 and the case
has been referred to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate.
On
January 31, a reporter with the community radio station Radio Islam in
Johannesburg, Faizel Patel, was forced to delete his photographs by police
after he took pictures of a peaceful protest at a shopping center in Lenasia, a
suburb south of Johannesburg, news reports said.
"I
told them I have a right to take photographs in terms of Standing Order 156," Patel told CPJ, "but the
police officer started swearing at me and told me to leave."
Standing
Order 156 is a 27-page-long order that governs the South Africa Police
Service's (SAPS) interaction with the media. It states that "a media
representative may not be prohibited from taking photographs or making visual
recordings" of the police, and that a journalist whose conduct may disturb
evidence or obstruct the police from performing their duties may be
"courteously requested to leave the crime scene" and if they refuse
they must be "escorted out of the restricted area."
The order
specifies that "under no circumstances" may a representative of the
media "be verbally or physically abused and cameras or other equipment may
not be seized unless such camera or equipment may be seized as an exhibit in
terms of any law. Under no circumstances whatsoever, may a member willfully
damage the camera, film, recording or other equipment of a media
representative."
Patel
said the saga ended when he accompanied
police to the station, where a senior officer ordered his press card returned
to him. "I didn't want to press charges, I was just flabbergasted that the
guy swore at me for doing my job and I wanted an apology. The head of the
tactical unit said he didn't know about Standing Order 156." All the officers involved apologized
to Patel, he said.
In
another incident on January 22, three police officers in Soweto, south of
Johannesburg, forced Mpho Raborife, a reporter with the South Africa Press
Association (SAPA), to delete photos from her cellphone, according to news reports. Raborife said she was driving past a
Somali-owned shop when she saw three police vehicles parked outside and two men
loading items, including packs of cold drinks, into a white van, according to news reports. She drove off but a police vehicle followed
her and flagged her down. An officer watched over her shoulder as she deleted
the pictures, the same news reports said.
CPJ
sent repeated emails and phone messages to the national police spokesperson
asking for a response to these three incidents, but received no reply.
The
South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) condemned the police's actions
against Raborife in a statement and noted that senior police officers, including the
national commissioner of police, had promised that "such illegal
behavior" would end.
In
March 2014, following a meeting with police communications officers led by the
national police commissioner General Riah Phiyega, the SAPS and Sanef issued a
joint statement that agreed that a high-level committee of police
and editors would be established to improve police-media relations.
Despite
this agreement, barely a month later, in the run-up to the April 2014 national
elections, a bodyguard of President Jacob Zuma forced a journalist with
privately owned eNCA television channel, Nickolaus Bauer, to delete photos
from his cellphone that showed provincial traffic police carrying t-shirts
supporting the ruling African National Congress in one of their vehicles, news reports said. Police issued a statement acknowledging the allegation and promised to
investigate the matter.
In
the past 24 months Sanef has issued at least seven statements protesting police
intimidation of journalists, which included ordering reporters to delete
photographs. The most recent referred to the incident outside parliament
involving Jan Gerber.
Chairperson
of media freedom at Sanef and editor of the privately-owned daily Beeld
newspaper Adriaan Basson told CPJ that he believed the heavy-handed behavior of
police was linked to the "increasing militarization" of the SAPS
which started about five years ago. In July 2009, the then-new police
commissioner Bheki Cele said he wanted the law changed to allow SAPS members to
"shoot to kill."
Basson said this has resulted in the
killing of protesters and innocent bystanders. In June 2011 the police
said no such order had ever been given, but police brutality in South
Africa has risen by more than 300 percent in the past decade, according to
research cited in news reports.
A year ago, police shot dead a freelance
community-based photographer, according to CPJ research, and an
official commission
of inquiry still has to deliver its report into the police shooting of
striking miners at Marikana
in the North-West Province in August 2012 in which 34 protesters were killed.
"It
isn't crazy to assume that police don't want the media to capture and showcase
these deeds," which prompts them to turn on journalists, Basson told CPJ.
He said Sanef had a "direct line" to the office of the national
police commissioner and that the head of communications at SAPS was sympathetic
to the plight of journalists, but this attitude did not always filter down to
station level where the abuses occur.
"We hope this will be communicated
thoroughly to the entire service," he said. "It is dangerous for a
democracy when a police service starts to view itself as above the law."
Sue
Valentine, CPJ's Africa program coordinator, has worked as a journalist in
print and radio in South Africa since the late 1980s, including at The Star newspaper in Johannesburg
and as the executive producer of a national daily current affairs radio show on
the SABC, South Africa's public broadcaster.
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