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'Closing paper was political'
11/10/2003 20:36 - (SA)
Johannesburg - The controversial closure of Zimbabwe's only private independent daily last month was a direct attack on the country's opposition, a senior opposition official said on Saturday.
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Secretary General Welshman Ncube said the closure had deprived the party of reaching thousands of citizens in the southern African country.
"The attack on the Daily News is not an attack on the owners of the paper to prevent them from becoming rich and making money," Ncube told a seminar run by the Peace and Democracy Project (PDP) in Johannesburg, a non-governmental organisation founded by youths exiled from Zimbabwe.
"It is principally an attack on the MDC, for the simple reason that if you remove the Daily News as a source of news, you have literally made it impossible for the opposition's voice to be heard by the mass of people."
Catch-22
The Daily News was forcibly shut down by police on September 12, a day after the Supreme Court ruled that it was operating illegally because it was not licensed by a government media commission under the country's 18-month-old media laws.
The paper had gone to the Supreme Court to challenge the constitutional validity of the media laws compelling all media houses and journalists to register, but the court said it would not hear the case until the newspaper was registered.
Since the closure and seizure of its equipment, the paper tried to register but its application was rejected by the media commission.
It has since been shuttling between the country's courts to have the commission's decision reviewed, and a hearing has now been set for October 16.
Ncube, who also acts as one of the MDC's principal lawmakers, said he was saddened by the fact that the paper had been closed by a court order.
"For me the tragedy of the closure of the Daily News is that it was achieved directly by an order of the court of law.
"I think it is unprecedented in the 21st century that a newspaper can be closed by five learned lawyers, before they could hear its application before court, and demand it to stop publishing," he said.
- AFP
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