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Weekly Media Review 2010-44
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Monday November 8th - Sunday November 16th 2010
November 19, 2010

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MMPZ notes with the gravest concern the sudden surge in the persecution of private media journalists in Zimbabwe by the authorities.

In the past two weeks the private media have recorded the harassment and arrest of at least nine journalists across the country, mainly stemming from stories exposing government brutality in elections with the complicity of the police force. The cases involved three freelancers from Manicaland, five journalists from Alpha Media Holdings, publishers of the private daily, NewsDay, and the weeklies the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard, and the Editor of the UK-based weekly, The Zimbabwean.

As we went to Press, NewsDay (18/11) reported the arrest of The Standard's Bulawayo-based journalist Nqobani Ndlovu for contravening Section 96 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, which criminalizes the publication of falsehoods. The charges emanated from the story, Police exams cancelled, published in the private weekly (14/11), which alleged plans by the Zimbabwe Republic Police to recall retired police officers and war veterans to occupy vacant top posts to direct operations in next year's elections. The paper claimed the recall "follows the scrapping of this year's promotional examinations for the police force . . . which are used as the basis for promoting junior officers to the ranks of sergeant and inspector".

NewsDay (18/11) also reported the police as having expressed their intention to question The Standard editor Nevanji Madanhire over the same report. Prior to Ndlovu's arrest, the police had reportedly picked up his friend and NewsDay's Bulawayo bureau chief, Dumisani Sibanda, for questioning and was only released on condition that he brought along Ndlovu the following day.

These incidents were not isolated.

Last week, the police summoned journalists from the Zimbabwe Independent over a story exposing Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri's alleged opposition to electoral reforms (The Zimbabwean, 11/11). This came barely a week after the police announced that they had secured a warrant of arrest for editor-in-chief of The Zimbabwean Wilf Mbanga in connection with a story implicating state agents in the suspected murder of a senior elections official, Ignatius Mushangwe, in the 2008 presidential run-off (The Zimbabwean On Sunday, 7/11). Mbanga denied publishing such a story.

MMPZ views such harassment as unwarranted persecution of the country's independent media community and an indication of the heavy-handed use of repressive laws that is likely to be pursued by the authorities in the period leading up to next year's elections. Such action is not only a blow to any hopes for genuine media reforms signed up to by the parties to the coalition government, but to all Zimbabweans' hopes for a less suffocating media environment that prevailed during the country's last traumatic election experience.

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