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[HCDX] Zimbabwe
Exiled media refuses to be silenced
Thulani Mpofu, Foreign Correspondent
* Last Updated: March 22. 2009 8:30AM UAE / March 22. 2009 4:30AM GMT
Gerry Jackson, the founder and station manager of SW Radio Africa, says
the service is popular in Zimbabwe's rural areas. Jonathan Player for
The National
BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE // Immediately after Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court
declared the monopoly of the state broadcaster unconstitutional in Sept
2000, a prominent disc jockey, Gerry Jackson, set up the country’s first
independent radio station.
Capital Radio managed to broadcast from a hotel room in central Harare
for six days before armed police raided the studio and confiscated
equipment.
In Dec 2001, Jackson moved to London, recruited six Zimbabwean
journalists and launched SW Radio Africa, which has beamed news into
Zimbabwe ever since, becoming a trailblazer in what has become a
thriving Zimbabwean media-in-exile.
Since Robert Mugabe, the president, intensified his suppression of
independent media within Zimbabwe, shutting down at least five privately
owned newspapers and entrenching the government’s monopoly of the
airwaves, many print or radio outlets, like SW Radio Africa, established
themselves online, operating out of Washington, London, the Netherlands
and South Africa.
The outlets, staffed by some of Zimbabwe’s best journalists and
broadcasters who have been forced into exile, publish stories that would
otherwise go unreported in the restricted local media.
“We are on air daily for two hours between 5pm and 7pm UK time,” said
Jackson, station manager of SW Radio Africa, which broadcasts in English
and Shona, the most widely spoken local Zimbabwean language, on the
internet and via mobile phone SMS to 30,000 subscribers in Zimbabwe.
“The radio is extremely popular, especially in rural areas,” she said.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said that of its top
10 list of countries that have forced journalists into exile between
July 2001 and June 2007, six were African.
Zimbabwe tops the list with 48 journalists forced into exile, followed
by Ethiopia with 34 and Eritrea with 19.
The CPJ executive director, Joel Simon, wrote to Morgan Tsvangirai,
Zimbabwe’s new prime minister, recently, urging the unity government to
scrap repressive media laws.
“The government of national unity should take immediate steps to abolish
laws that require licensing of newspapers and journalists, allow the
banned Daily News to recommence operations, end jamming of foreign radio
stations, permit all local and foreign journalists who have been
deported, banned, or forced into exile for security concerns to return
safely and without harassment,” Mr Simon said.
Besides Jackson’s SW Radio Africa, other independent media in exile
include Voice of America’s Studio 7, the US government-funded
broadcaster’s Zimbabwe news service, which operates out of Washington,
and the Netherlands-based Voice of the People.
Up to 15 online news outlets also operate outside the country, gathering
local news through a network of correspondents who use pseudonyms to
evade arrest, including this reporter.
Wilf Mbanga, another exiled journalist, publishes two newspapers from
the UK – Zimbabwe’s first physical newspapers in exile.
The government controls 10 provincial weeklies and seven national
newspapers including the country’s only two dailies. It also runs four
radio stations and the country’s sole television channel, all of which
are widely seen as pro-Mugabe.
Only three independent weeklies remain, but they have limited circulations.
The government says the exile radio stations are “pirates” and
frequently jams their transmission. It has failed to do much about
web-based publications, however, even though correspondents face the
risk of arrest.
Takura Zhangazha, the director of the Media Institute of Southern
Africa, Zimbabwe chapter, a group that campaigns for press freedom, said
independent media in Zimbabwe have been destroyed by tough laws under
which newspapers and broadcasters must register with
government-appointed commissions, and by the jail terms given to
journalists found working without accreditation.
“The existing laws must be repealed and replaced by a freedom of
information act, which guarantees citizens access to information [and]
establishes a self-regulatory body as opposed to the current statutory
one,” Mr Zhangazha said.
“Clauses that criminalise journalism practice also need to be removed.”
Andrew Moyse, co-ordinator of the Media Monitoring Project, Zimbabwe,
said the exiled media have played a useful role.
“They fill the gap created by the lack of an independent daily,” Mr
Moyse said.
“We only have three weeklies that are reaching a few readers because of
their low circulation. On broadcasting we have a broken-down public
broadcaster, which reaches only 35 per cent of the population.”
Despite state controls on the media, he said, information still manages
to leak down to the public and “civil society gets by word of mouth what
the domestic weeklies may miss”.
However, despite their popularity, Mr Moyse said, the internet
publications and radio stations have problems reaching the majority of
poor Zimbabweans who lack internet access or transistors.
Most radios in Zimbabwe, he added, do not have short wave, the platform
on which exiled stations broadcast. Last year, he said, authorities
seized short-wave wind-up radios that had been donated to some communities.
“In rural areas, the wind-up short-wave radios helped because most
people have frequency modulation and medium-wave radios.
“The wind-up radios were very helpful also because people do not need
batteries, which most rural communities may not afford.”
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090322/FOREIGN/724383645/1017/ART
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