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Zim journos 'face crackdown'
02/05/2004 19:48 - (SA)
Harare - Journalists in Zimbabwe still risk arrest and imprisonment if they publish anything the government deems untrue or unfairly critical, with no sign of a let-up in a two-year-old crackdown on the media.
Despite repeated calls for a review of the tough media laws that came into force in 2002, local journalists say there is little hope that the regulations will be changed under President Robert Mugabe.
"In the last 12 months we have seen the crackdown on the media being intensified and taken to new heights," said Abel Mutsakani, president of the Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe (IJAZ).
"We saw a situation where the media has been brought under the control of the central government," he said, referring to a recent court decision upholding that the state had a right to demand that journalists and their employers had to register before operating in the country.
Under Zimbabwe's media laws journalists and their employers need to be licensed by a state-appointed commission, while the communication of false information carries a fine or maximum five-year prison term under security laws.
The IJAZ, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa-Zimbabwe), the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists and the Media Monitoring project of Zimbabwe said in a report to mark press freedom day Monday that more than 100 people working in the media had been arrested under the media and security laws since 2000.
"The past four years have seen some of the worst media and freedom of expression violations being perpetrated on journalists," they said, adding that the media environment in the troubled southern African state "can best be described as anarchic", they added.
"Media practitioners face detention, arrest, imprisonment and even death," said Misa-Zimbabwe. "Working as a journalist or media practitioner especially for the independent media, has become a hazardous if not life-threatening."
- SAPA
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