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African leaders should worry about Zim media: Editors
South African Press Association (Johannesburg)
October 27, 2003

Johannesburg - African leaders should be concerned about the detention of directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, the Africa Editors Forum's interim chairman, Mathatha Tsedu, said on Monday.

"The ongoing circus in Zimbabwe, where the government is now detaining directors of the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, publishers of the Daily News, must be a cause for concern for all leaders of this continent." He said a court ruled last week that the Daily News, which had been banned since last month, should be relicenced.

The court had also made a more significant finding, namely that "the Media Commission which is supposed to license all media in Zimbabwe, is itself improperly constituted".

"This effectively means that all licences that have been given by this body since last year are invalid. "It also means that the commission cannot issue a valid licence to the Daily News until it is itself reconstituted.

"The upshot of all these should indeed be that the Daily News should be allowed to publish with its old licence, just like all the other media," said Tsedu. He added, "We are witnessing a macabre situation where the embarrassed government and the ministry of information in particular, are now harassing the paper and staging a sit-in in their offices.

"Journalists have been detained and are now being prohibited from practising their profession." Tsedu said: "Zimbabwe has signed on to the African Union (AU) charter which guarantees freedom of expression and we call on the chairperson of the AU, President Joachim Chissano, to intervene and save the continent from the daily embarrassment that is generated out of Harare."

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