Zimbabwe dispatch

Critical reporting

Ongoing media intimidation is a sure sign of Zimbabwean government insecurity, writes Andrew Meldrum
Associated Press correspondent Angus Shaw eluded Zimbabwe police by driving across the Chirundu bridge spanning the Zambezi River to enter Zambia on February 18.

Times correspondent Jan Raath evaded arrest the day before by travelling across Zimbabwe to the southern Plumtree border post and crossing into Botswana.

Two other Zimbabwean journalists, Brian Latham of Bloomberg news and independent television producer Cornelius Nduna, fled the country in similar circumstances.

The police and agents of the country's notorious secret service had exhaustively interrogated the journalists and searched their offices without warrants. As teams of investigators seized their computer hard drives and rifled through their filing cabinets, the journalists were accused of spying, working without a state licence and indulging in illegal foreign exchange deals.

"It was harassment," said their lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa. "The authorities were just looking for an excuse to arrest them."

"We were not in fear for our lives but for our liberty," said Mr Raath after arriving in Botswana. Under Zimbabwe's laws they could be held for 28 days without appearing in court. Zimbabwe's jails are filthy and overcrowded, and it is well documented that police have tortured many critics of the regime of their president, Robert Mugabe. The journalists had good reasons to flee.

Their adventurous escapes spell bad news for Zimbabwe's struggling press.

The four were almost the last journalists to work for the foreign news media and, as a result of Zimbabwe's draconian press controls, no independent journalists will replace them. Now only the Daily Telegraph still has a correspondent in Zimbabwe and the news agencies Reuters and Agence France-Presse have managed to maintain small offices in Harare.

Just five weeks before Zimbabwe's crucial parliamentary elections, on March 31, there are far too few journalists left to record how Mugabe's government conducts the polls.

Zimbabweans have already dubbed the upcoming contest the "free and fear elections". Most people don't believe the polls will be credible because of the widespread anxiety that there will be a resurgence of the state-sponsored violence in which 300 opposition supporters were killed in the previous parliamentary elections in 2000.

The government's heavy-handed tactics against the four journalists are the latest in its campaign to muzzle the press, both foreign and domestic. I experienced this first hand nearly two years ago when, in May, 2003, I was dragged away from a group of journalists by state security agents. After they abducted me they put a hood over my head and held me for more than 10 hours until they forcibly, and illegally, put me on a plane to London.

Earlier I had been jailed for two days and put on trial, facing a jail sentence of two years. As soon as I was acquitted, the Mugabe government tried to deport me, but my valiant lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, won a court order stating that I had every legal right to reside and work in Zimbabwe.

After that the Mugabe government simply kidnapped me and expelled me from the country.

In the past two years the Mugabe government has closed three newspapers and charged more than 70 journalists with crimes. It is nothing short of a calculated campaign to prevent journalists from reporting freely on events in Zimbabwe, especially state-sponsored torture, violence and corruption.

Zimbabwe won the dubious honour of being named one of the 10 worst countries in the world to be a journalist by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The organisation wrote to Mr Mugabe to protest the threats against journalists. "The police harassment of Zimbabwean journalists working for international media outlets looks like a cynical attempt to silence critical reporting to the outside world and intimidate what remains of the independent press in the context of upcoming elections."

The United States state department also lambasted the Mugabe government for its repression of the press. "We have noted over time a pattern of intimidation of journalists," said spokesman Richard Boucher. "We have noted over time the pattern in Zimbabwe of shutting down newspapers, shutting down civil society, restrictions on civil society, a climate where the opposition, for example, fears for its safety."

The Mugabe government's campaign against the press may succeed in the short term, but its fear of open and critical reporting shows that it is not confident of its long-term future.

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