|
Back to Index
Information
Minister defends Zimbabwe's draconian media laws
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2006-14
Monday
April 3rd – Sunday April 9th 2006
DESPITE widespread
condemnation of the current repressive legislative environment,
Information Minister Tichaona Jokonya continued to defend the country’s
draconian media laws. The Herald and Chronicle (8/4)
passively reported him telling visiting Indonesian journalists that
Zimbabwe’s media laws were "designed to protect both
the Press and the general public", adding that there
was "nothing draconian" about the widely
condemned AIPPA.
And to downplay
the offensive nature of the Act, the minister absurdly depicted
AIPPA as a lesser evil as compared to some laws found in the US
such as the Patriotic Act, which he claimed was being used to "make
arbitrary arrests of travellers at that country’s airports".
But how exactly
this US piece of legislation could be compared to AIPPA, an information
law, remained unexplained. Neither would the papers apprise their
readers on laws that governed media operations and the flow of information
in the US. Instead, they supinely allowed him to further project
Zimbabwe’s human rights record as better than that of the US. He
claimed that, "unlike the US", Harare "had
no ambitions of invading other countries like what the US did in
the case of Iraq, before butchering innocent children and women
and later masquerading as a champion of human rights".
However, The
Standard (9/4) reported Swedish ambassador Sten Rylander disproving
the authorities’ claims that their tyrannical media laws were not
only unique to Zimbabwe but a common feature in the statutes of
the West. He noted that contrary to claims by Media and Information
Commission chairman Tafataona Mahoso that Sweden’s media laws were
more repressive than those of Zimbabwe, his country’s media policy
promoted freedom of expression and nurtured media independence and
diversity.
Said Rylander:
"There has never been an agenda in Sweden to shut down
newspapers, big or small, because they cannot raise the required
capital to publish nor for the simple reason that they have changed
shareholding structures without informing government or a quasi-governmental
department".
Notably, these
are some of the main reasons The Tribune has remained closed
since June 2004.
Visit the MMPZ
fact sheet
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
TOP
|
