Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned by the climate of intimidation in which journalists covering the upcoming parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe are being forced to work. In recent weeks, local and foreign correspondents have been subjected to harassment and even violence by politicians and other individuals associated with your government and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in ZIMBABWE. New York, June 21, 2000 –As Zimbabwe’s June 24-25 parliamentary elections approach, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is calling on President Robert Mugabe to publicly guarantee that journalists will be free to cover them without fear of reprisal.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in ZIMBABWE. New York, June 20, 2000 — Three journalists from the independent Zimbabwean weekly The Standard were sentenced to pay massive fines after a Harare court found them guilty of criminal defamation last week, sources in Zimbabwe told CPJ.
New York, May 23, 2000 — The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe dismissed charges against reporters Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto for publishing a report alleging a military coup plot against President Robert Mugabe, according to international reports and CPJ’s sources in Harare.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in ZIMBABWE. New York, May 3, 2000— Zimbabwe authorities cleared all charges yesterday against Associated Press photographer Obed Zilwa, who had been held on suspicion of perpetrating a terrorist bomb attack on the Harare offices of the Daily News, local sources told CPJ.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in ZIMBABWE. [Click here to read CPJ’s April 27 protest letter to President Mugabe.] New York, April 27, 2000 — On April 26, Harare airport police arrested Obed Zilwa, an Associated Press photographer, on suspicion that he may have been involved in an April 22 bomb…
By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…
By Claudia McElroyAll over Africa, conflict continued to be the single biggest threat to journalists and to press freedom itself. Both civil and cross-border wars were effectively used as an excuse by governments (and rebel forces) to harass, intimidate, and censor the press–often in the name of “national security”–and in some cases to kill journalists…