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Cape Times correspondent in Zimbabwe wins major award
Peter Fabricius, The Cape Times (SA)
November 01, 2007

http://www.topix.com/world/zimbabwe/2007/11/cape-times-correspondent-in-zimbabwe-wins-major-award

Zimbabwe correspondent for the Cape Times, Peta Thornycroft, has received a lifetime achievement award for a career of courageous journalism from film star Angelina Jolie. On Tuesday night, in Beverly Hills, Jolie presented Thornycroft, 62, with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) for her dedication and bravery in reporting on apartheid South Africa and, for the last few years, on Zimbabwe. "In the face of a media crackdown in Zimbabwe, Peta Thornycroft renounced her British citizenship in 2001 and became a Zimbabwean so that she could continue to report in the country," said the IWMF, a global network for women in the news media. "A journalist for more than three decades, Thornycroft is one of the few remaining independent journalists in Zimbabwe. She has also paved the way for, and supported, other journalists. She helped to establish the Media Monitoring Project, an independent trust that works to promote responsible journalism in Zimbabwe and helped to form the Public Broadcasting Initiative, a project that brought broadcast journalism training to journalists." Thornycroft has managed to continue reporting from Zimbabwe despite a major crackdown by the government against the independent media and despite never having been officially accredited as a journalist, a legal requirement which Mugabe's government introduced a few years ago as it intensified political repression.

In 2002 she spent five days in jail after she travelled to Chimanimani, 483km east of Harare, to pursue a story about "people having homes destroyed for being suspected of voting for the opposition", as she said. She had already talked to dissidents and set up an appointment with a local Mugabe supporter. "You have to get two sides of the story," she said. While waiting in a Chimanimani café for the appointment, Thornycroft noticed "that the guy opposite from me was on his cellphone and that he was making a phone call about me. But I didn't run for my car. I didn't try to avoid it". Four policemen then arrested her. She spent five days in prison before being freed, after an outcry from the international media community about her arrest. No charges were filed against her. Since then, she rarely spends nights at home but moves from one location to another, continuing her reporting. She has "a sixth sense of how to stay safe", including when to take risks. She sometimes tells people: "I'm leaving now, if you have not heard from me in five hours, call a lawyer." However, she has been known to break her own rules by forgetting to call home after getting engrossed in a story. This was Thornycroft's second international award for journalism this year. In June she received the James Cameron Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence and courage in reporting from the field. The award commemorates the veteran British journalist who died in 1985.

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