Zimbabwe cracks down on newspaper chiefs
Four directors of Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper were charged today with violating the country’s severe media laws – part of the government crackdown against dissent.
The charges followed the banning of the Daily News by the government over the weekend. On Monday police continued to search the offices and seize equipment from its offices.
Four of the directors of the Associated Newspapers group, owners of the Daily News, were questioned by police and told they had violated the media laws, said Gugulethu Moyo, their lawyer.
Police trucks were parked outside the newspaper’s Harare offices.
Moyo said the directors were charged under a section of the stringent Access to Information laws for publishing a newspaper without official registration by the state media commission.
The government-appointed media commission on Saturday denied the paper’s application for registration and accreditation, saying it had not followed proper registration procedures and published illegally for eight months without being registered.
The newspaper, with 300 employees and a daily readership of more than 940,000, said it would challenge the ban in court.
A coalition of pro-democracy and reform groups, meanwhile, described the banning of the Daily News as the ruling party’s “most serious attack yet on freedom of expression.”
There are fears the crackdown against dissent and opposition to the government of long-time autocratic ruler President Robert Mugabe might be intensifying.
“The next likely target of the ongoing campaign to snuff out alternative voices will be civil society organisations,” said Brian Raftopoulos, a spokesman for the Crisis Coalition of civic organisations and church and independent human rights groups.
“Without an independent daily newspaper to comment on and expose these injustices, attacks on human rights and constitutional freedoms are likely to continue,” he said.
Since its launch in 1999, the Daily News has given a voice to critics of Mugabe’s 23 year rule.
The state controls the country’s two other dailies and the single television and radio station that routinely ignore reports of human rights violations and political violence blamed largely on ruling party militants and police, troops and state authorities.
