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Crackdown
on alternative channels of information
Media Monitoring
Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2005-07
Monday 14th February – Sunday 20th February
2005
THIS week the
authorities intensified their crackdown on the few remaining alternative
channels of information further shrinking the media space ahead
of next month’s parliamentary election.
The Daily
Mirror (15/2 & 17/2) and The Standard (20/2) reported
that police had repeatedly raided - without a search warrant - the
offices of three well known veteran local journalists writing for
international media organisations on spurious allegations that they
were involved in spying, possessing illegal telecoms equipment and
illegally working as journalists. Angus Shaw of the Associated Press,
Jan Raath, correspondent for The Times of London, and Brian
Latham, the correspondent for the Bloomberg news agency, all Zimbabwean
citizens, fled the country fearing for their safety as a result
of this latest bout of official intimidation. Two of the journalists
received threatening visitors at their homes in the middle of the
night.
In another related
matter, The Zimbabwe Independent (18/2) reported that police
had "stormed" the offices of New Distribution,
the distributor of The Zimbabwean, a new paper published
in the UK and South Africa, demanding details on the paper’s registration
and printers.
These raids
came hardly two days after Zim Online (12/2) reported
that the police were hunting for freelance television journalist
Cornelius Nduna who they claimed was in possession of "sensitive
videotapes". The police also resuscitated three-year-old charges
of "publishing falsehoods" against columnist Pius Wakatama.
According to
Zim Online, the police wanted to arrest Nduna in connection
with the BBC’s Panorama documentary, which exposed human
rights abuses by youths trained under the government’s controversial
national youth service programme.
The government
media ignored these issues.
This latest
onslaught against the alternative media represents a continuation
of the authorities’ crude and relentless efforts to stifle the Zimbabwean
story from reaching the international community, a policy they have
systematically pursued in the last five years.
The government
appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC) appeared to be
following a similar agenda when The Sunday Mirror (20/2)
reported the organisation warning the Zimbabwe Independent
against allowing its "staffers moonlight for foreign
media houses or risk having the newspaper’s licence as well as the
staffers’ accreditation revoked".
MIC also threatened
to block the importation of a new weekly newspaper entitled The
Zimbabwean, published abroad by one of The Daily News’
founders, Wilf Mbanga, on the grounds that it violated media ethics
and business practice, and was probably financed by "an
imperialist and racist godfather" using European and
North American "slush funds […] to undermine national,
duly registered and truly sovereign publishers…" inside
Zimbabwe. In his statement MIC chairman Tafataona Mahoso said his
organization "will…not hesitate to take the necessary
steps to…protect our national and sovereign print media industry".
Evidently, Dr
Mahoso has no faith in the democratic ideal of a free marketplace
of ideas where a diverse media community compete for the people’s
patronage. Nor must he rate the capacity of Zimbabweans to make
their own informed choices.
Such pathological
intolerance of free media further exposes the fallacy of government’s
repeated claims that it is a democracy complying with the SADC protocol
on the conduct of democratic elections.
The SADC guidelines
clearly state that member States should ‘safeguard the human
and civil liberties of all citizens’, and media freedom
is one of those fundamental rights that should be guaranteed during
an election - and indeed at all times.
Visit the MMPZ fact
sheet
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