Student Says He Was Detained in Zimbabwe
Arrest on Research Trip Unsubstantiated

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 11 -- A Harvard University student from the District said Wednesday that he had been arrested in Zimbabwe during a trip to research his senior thesis, then held in grimy cells for five days before his parents and local lawyers managed to free him.

Amar Bakshi, 21, a Harvard senior and a 2002 graduate of St. Albans School in Northwest, said the key to his release might have been a surreptitious cell phone call he made soon after his arrest on Dec. 30. Speaking quietly in a bathroom, he told a friend that he had been pulled off an outbound airplane by plainclothes officers.

"That was the scariest thing," Bakshi said. "A lot hinged on that phone call."

Bakshi described his ordeal in an interview at a mall near the Harvard campus. It was difficult to find immediate official corroboration: A spokeswoman said the State Department was aware of the case but was unable to provide further information because of privacy concerns. A spokesman for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences said he would confirm only that Bakshi is a student.

At the Zimbabwean Embassy in Washington, spokesman Wilbert Gwashavanhu said that he could not confirm any part of Bakshi's account. He added that he thought it implausible that a Harvard student would be jailed in Zimbabwe simply for doing research.

"I'm wondering really where the truth rests," Gwashavanhu said.

Bakshi's account of the ordeal was reported previously by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, and in Zimbabwe by the Standard, an independent weekly.

Bakshi said he had gone to Zimbabwe, a southern African nation that has spiraled into poverty and repression in recent years, on Dec. 18. It was the second of two trips he made there last year for his thesis, which concerns political propaganda and the country's youths during the past five years.

During this trip, Bakshi said, he talked to officials in the information ministry for longtime President Robert Mugabe, and collected tapes of news, arts programs and jingles designed to promote government policies on Zimbabwean television.

Bakshi said he was on a plane waiting to depart the airport in Harare, the capital, when five or six men appeared in the jetway. They took him off the plane and into a small room.

"Why are you here? What are these videotapes? You're spying on us," Bakshi recalled the officers saying. They threatened him: "You don't know how horrible this will become."

Bakshi said he made up a diversion, something like "I urgently need to go to the bathroom." Although he had been told to turn his phone off, he called his friend, who then called the U.S. Embassy.

After that, "I was confident that if people knew I was there, the situation would improve," Bakshi said.

It did not at first, however. Initially, Bakshi said, he was taken to a bare holding cell, covered with graffiti left by previous inmates, phrases such as, "Please get me out of here," he said.

After one night, he was moved to a larger jail, where about 120 prisoners were squeezed in among flea-infested mattresses and overflowing toilets. By this time, however, Bakshi said his case had made it to the embassy, which he said sent officials to assure him he would eventually be released.

The news also had made it back to the District, where Bakshi's parents -- both doctors -- live near Sibley Memorial Hospital.

"The first few moments were of panic and of 'My God, what's happening to my boy!' " said his mother, Gita Chopra Bakshi, a pulmonologist. "Then it was a job to do, which was we have to go over there and get him back."

His parents flew to Harare, made connections with local lawyers and eventually had the charges dropped. Bakshi spent a few days in Washington, then returned to Harvard on Wednesday. He said he probably will not be going back to Zimbabwe "for a while."

He said, however, that he intends to write about his experience, on behalf of the many people he met who are probably still in jail. Bakshi recalled one of his fellow inmates, who told him, "in your thesis, make sure to write about all the good things that you saw here with us."

"Then there's sort of this dot-dot-dot . . . and [he] says, 'And be sure to tell them how bad the situation is, too,' " Bakshi said.