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Another
assault on media freedom and information rights
Media Monitoring
Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2004-39
Monday September 27th – October 3rd 2004
AS this report
was being completed, news of yet another assault on media freedom
and information rights filtered into the public domain – no thanks
to the government-controlled media, which simply censored all news
of the arrest and detention of more than 50 civilians outside Parliament
on Tuesday, October 5th.
The Daily
Mirror (6/10) reported that its photographer, Desmond Kwande,
freelance photographer Tsvangirai Mukwazhi and "another
unidentified journalist" had been arrested outside
Parliament while covering an attempt by the activist civic rights
group, Women Of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), to deliver a petition to
Parliament protesting against the provisions of the NGO Bill. Although
the paper failed to identify the third journalist, international
media named him as Reuters photographer, Howard Burditt.
Fifty-two women
protesters were also arrested.
The journalists
spent the night in police cells and were only released the following
day without charge, according to The Daily Mirror (7/10).
The women were still in jail at the time this report was sent for
publication. The paper quoted Kwande saying the police accused them
of being part of the organisers of the WOZA demonstration.
The journalists’
arrest comes barely two weeks after the detention of three other
media workers from the Zimbabwe Independent.
The government
media’s crude efforts to prevent this latest attempt to terrorize
civil society and independent media workers from becoming public
knowledge demonstrates once again that these organisations have
no right to describe themselves as news organisations; their disdain
for their obligation to inform the public of such important developments
clearly establishes them as instruments of government propaganda.
The irregular
arrest and detention of officially accredited media workers also
demonstrates the government’s determination to gag alternative sources
of information precisely to prevent important news from reaching
the public domain. The silence of the Media and Information Commission
over the journalists’ arrests and the government media’s censoring
of the news clearly indicates an alternative agenda to its mandate
of promoting and protecting the integrity and diversity of the media.
Instead, those
who rely on the so-called media organisations controlled by government
are being bombarded with propaganda about events affecting their
livelihoods with almost no recourse to alternative sources of information.
During the week
under review, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo was quoted in The
Herald (28/9) defending the public broadcaster’s programming,
saying it was meant to "preserve values (with) which
the nation identifies itself" because "the
celebration of British and American values in the local media would
have made Zimbabwe more vulnerable, especially in the wake of attempts
by the two countries to effect regime change in Zimbabwe".
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