Zimbabwe Flattens What Little Freedom of the Press Remained
by Ian Mosley
On May 3rd, some media outlets around the world celebrated a UN-sponsored holiday called World Press Freedom Day. (Other media outlets and newspapers didn’t bother. The UN has never been very successful in creating interesting artificial holidays.) Okay, so May 3rd was when the world was supposed to celebrate freedom of the press, where it exists, which nowadays isn’t very far and wide. It doesn’t exist at all in Robert Mugabe’s Marxist dictatorship in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia. There journalists who criticize “Comrade Bob” or his cronies, especially foreign journalists, are in for a very rough ride.
Journalists in Zimbabwe have had their basic rights systematically criminalized over the past decade, to the point where it is now for all practical intents and purposes impossible for a newspaper or television reporter to do his job and accurately report to the public what is going on around them. In a recent press statement the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a bunch of left-wing newspaper and TV people in South Africa who issue a lot of press releases under the odd delusion that anyone gives a damn what they have to say, stated: “Sadly for Zimbabwe, the past seven years have seen freedom of expression being downgraded from a right to a privilege that can only be exercised at the benevolence of the authorities.” The obvious solution to Zimbabwe’s problems–military intervention, the forcible removal of Robert Mugabe and his public execution is unthinkable for most Western leaders even though executing Saddam doesn’t seem to bother George Bush or Tony Blair.
Mugabe’s main weapon of crackdown on the press is something called the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). This makes it a felony punishable by prison (and in reality, by beating and torture at the hands of Mugabe’s thugs) for anyone to work as a journalist in any form without a license from the government called “accreditation.” Every journalist in Zimbabwe must renew their registration every 12 months with the Media and Information Commission; if not, they face up to two years in jail for practicing without a license. Newspaper companies are also required to register after every two years. Those failing to comply are forced to close and their equipment is seized by the state. Those are merely the on-paper penalties. In the real world, if a journalist works for the wrong newspaper or if he doesn’t have a ZANU-PF membership card (Mugabe’s Marxist terrorist ruling party) then he doesn’t get accredited, period, and if he publishes so much as one word that’s critical of Mugabe, he’s kidnapped off the streets of Bulawayo or the remains of Salisbury, taken out in the bush, and beaten half to death and/or thrown to the crocodiles.
At least 100 journalists have been arrested and tortured over the past six years for allegedly violating Mugabe’s censorship and press laws –namely writing and publishing something Mugabe didn’t like or revealing information his ruling ZANU-PF party finds embarrassing. Four newspapers, including the country’s biggest circulating daily, The Daily News, have been closed since 2003. As a result of the restrictive Broadcasting Services Act, independent radio stations have been kept off the air. Mugabe’s stranglehold on the means of communication in Zimbabwe is as complete and as iron-fisted as any in the world, and yet since he’s black, this fact has never managed to get more than an occasional “harumpf” from the rest of the world media.