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Government continues to threaten journalists
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2006-4
Monday January 23^rd – Sunday January 29^th 2006

DESPITE widespread condemnation of Zimbabwe’s undemocratic practices, particularly relating to repression of the domestic media, State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa declared in the week that the authorities would not relent in their determination to hound into extinction the country’s few remaining alternative sources of information.

Mutasa told The Manica Post that government "will not sit on its laurels" and watch a "crop of journalists" sell "the country to the enemy by writing falsehoods" with the "intention" of "undermining national security" and "agitating violence in the country".

He warned that although the journalists were using pseudonyms in reporting for "pirate radios, websites and other media", government had "since identified them from their closets" and that the "net will soon close in on all those who are involved in these illegal activities".

While the government-controlled weekly passively presented this latest threat to terrorize journalists as normal, SW Radio Africa and Studio 7 (27/1) reported it as the latest development in a systematic campaign by the authorities to obliterate the remaining pockets of alternative media in the country.

In another development, SW Radio Africa (30/1) reported that all journalists working for the Zimbabwe Independent were last Friday denied accreditation by the government-appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC). The station quoted unnamed sources alleging that MIC chairman Tafataona Mahoso was demanding the paper first retract a story it published last year on the resignation of former MIC commissioner Jonathan Maphenduka, allegedly after falling out with the commission over its handling of The Daily News’ application for an operating licence.

Reportedly, Mahoso wanted the paper to correctly identify the office to which Maphenduka had sent his resignation letter before he would accredit its reporters.

An unnamed journalist with the Independent told the station that the newspaper was willing to retract the story but the problem was that "they don’t know what exactly to retract as Mahoso’s arguments are of a technical nature" and "merely concerned with wanting to clear the fact that Maphenduka resigned from the wrong office".

Earlier, the paper’s boss Raphael Khumalo told Studio 7 (27/1) that there were "some outstanding issues" that were delaying accreditation of his journalists but would not elaborate.

While the MIC continues to restrict the private media, it has remained deafeningly silent on the government Press’ ongoing disdain for basic journalistic standards. For example, in an effort to discredit, as ‘a product of the West’, a report by the African Commission on Human and People Rights (ACHPR) condemning human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, Herald columnist Charles Mutete (30/1) falsely depicted the head of the commission’s 2002 fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe, Jainaba Johm, as a "white man".

The fact: Johm is a black Gambian woman.

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