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Police raid the Voice of the People radio station, arresting three of its journalists
Reporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders
December 16, 2005

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15924

Reporters Without Borders said today it was appalled by a police raid on the privately-owned radio station Voice of the People (VOP) in Harare yesterday in which equipment was seized and three of its journalists were arrested.

"Robert Mugabe's government is cracking down harder on dissenting news media and, in the face of an economic and political crisis, is behaving in an increasingly despotic manner," the press freedom organisation said.

"After managing to resolve an impasse in the food insecurity situation, the United Nations should take the issue of civil and political liberties seriously and, right now, should at the very least insist on VOP being allowed to resume broadcasting freely and should demand the immediate release of its three journalists," Reporters Without Borders added.

Armed state security agents raided the VOP office in Beverley Court Building in Harare at around 6 p.m. yesterday saying they were looking for broadcasting equipment and claiming that VOP, which has been legally registered as a Communication Trust since its creation in 2000, was not allowed to broadcast without a licence from the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ).

Failing to find any broadcasting equipment, the police confiscated the radio station's computers and arrested the three journalists present, Maria Nyanyiwa, Takunda Gwanda and Nyasha Bosha, who were taken to the Harare central police station. It is not know what they were charged with.

VOP's programmes in shona and ndebele, Zimbabwe's two main languages, are broadcast on the short wave from 7 to 8 p.m. from a transmitter in Madagascar operated by the Dutch public radio station, Radio Netherlands. VOP had to stop broadcasting from Zimbabwe after its studio in Milton Park in Harare were destroyed in an August 2002 explosion that was never solved by the police.

With the help of Chinese technicians, the Zimbabwean intelligence services jammed VOP's broadcasts from 18 to 26 October of this year. The jamming stopped after VOP switched to a different frequency.

The raid on VOP comes soon after the government drew up a list of leading government critics, including politicians, human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, who are banned from leaving or entering Zimbabwe. Customs officials have been ordered to seize their passports.

Press proprietor Trevor Ncube, for example, had his passport seized on arrival at Bulawayo airport in the south of the country on 9 November. A resident in South Africa, Ncube immediately filed a complaint before the Harare high court, which ruled in his favour yesterday, saying the "invalidation or withdrawal or cancellation of the applicant's passport is unlawful, null, void and of no force and effect."

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