CJA E-letter www.cjaweb.org

from the Commonwealth Journalists Association

Issue No 5 July 2004

Pages 2-4 Zimbabwe journalists in a minefield

Page 4 Mugabe’s Windhoek paper faces lawsuit

Pages 5-7 More from the CJA conference in Trinidad

Page 8 News in brief

Sixth journalist dies in valley of death

Bangladesh’s “valley of death” – the Khulna division in the south-west – claimed another victim in June when Humayun Kabir, 58-year-old editor of a daily paper, Janmabhumi, was killed by a bomber posing as a peanut seller. He was the sixth journalist to be murdered at Khulna in four years.

Kabir was getting out of his car with his family when the bomber threw two homemade bombs at him. He died in hospital soon after. His son Asif was also slightly hurt. Police said they had detained nine suspects.

Janajuddha (People’s War), a Communist group, claimed responsibility for Kabir’s death. It also said it killed his journalist friend Manik Saha, on January 15. Twelve people have been charged with this murder but local journalists say they do not include those who organised it.

Also in South-West Bangladesh, two journalists were so badly beaten by guards at Satkhira prison that they were detained in hospital. Mozaffar Rahman and Monirul Islam Moni had gone to the jail to follow up a newspaper report accusing guards of extorting money from visitors. Five staff are under investigation for the assault.

Editor still in jail after seven months

Seven months after he was detained at Dhaka airport, the editor of the weekly tabloid Blitz, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is still in prison. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has called for his release. He was arrested when on the way to a writers’ conference in Israel, a country which Bangladeshis are forbidden to visit. He has been charged with sedition in articles about the rise of Islamic extremism. These allegedly show Bangladesh in a critical light.

Zimbabwe journalists walk in a minefield

The government of Robert Mugabe has just closed another independent newspaper, the third in less than a year. BLESSING RUZENGWE, chairman of the CJA’s UK branch, discusses the situation with Foster Dongozi, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists

Ruzengwe You were a reporter for the independent daily, The Daily News, closed by Robert Mugabe's government last year. He has now closed another independent newspaper. What’s your view of this?

Dongozi I believe the closure of the Tribune is part of a sustained campaign to ensure that alternative voices are silenced in Zimbabwe either before the March general election or before the issue of succession [to Mugabe] is settled. While it is clear that The Daily News was closed because it exposed the excesses of the government and gave the opposition Movement for Democratic Change a voice to reach its supporters, the closure of the Tribune is a sign that the succession battles to succeed Mugabe are spilling into newsrooms. It also makes it clear that Mugabe is using the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act to attack perceived enemies within both the government and the opposition. It shows that the AIPPA does not protect even those on the government side from arbitrary closures and this includes the members of parliament who turned up to vote for it.

R What’s ZUJ’s view of this closure?

D We strongly condemn it because our members are affected by this sustained effort to whittle down the political space.

R Do you think Mugabe will close all independent newspapers critical of his government before the elections scheduled for March 2005?

D.I think the closure of The Daily News was enough [for him]. It could daily give an alternative view and counter the propaganda in the [state-owned] Herald. The Tribune is the victim of internal squabbles in Zanu PF [Mugabe’s party]. The other independent papers, The Standard and The Independent, may be allowed to continue because they are weeklies, are expensive and will not penetrate rural communities to tilt political opinion. They may also be allowed to exist so as to give the impression that everything is done in a transparent and fair manner. Of course if those [The Standard and the Independent] are closed, they will claim that The Daily Mirror and the Financial Gazette are independent newspapers. But you and I know that they are owned by people with strong links to the ruling party.

R But do you think Mugabe will close more newspapers?

D You can never be sure. Mahoso [Tafataona Mahoso, chairman of the Media and Information Commission that licenses journalists and media organisations] has been quoted as saying his next project will be The Standard. In the end they might let the Standard and The Independent operate in such a restrictive and constrained environment that they will not be effective.

R How do Zimbabwe journalists operate in the hostile environment created by Mugabe's government?

D Working as a journalist in Zimbabwe is like walking through a minefield. Our members are subjected to regular arrests and detentions. They operate in a climate of fear, which is designed to ensure self-censorship. Those working for the independent media face the most severe threat as their publications can be closed. Most of them have been arrested at one time or another.

R Will journalists in Zimbabwe be able to effectively cover next March's parliamentary elections?

D As a union, we hope we will be able to do our job undisturbed during the general elections. ZUJ members in the private media are usually attacked by ruling party ruffians who accuse them of supporting the opposition, while the hooligan element in the opposition attack journalists from the state media, accusing them of being pro-government. In the past, some areas have been sealed off from the media. This is usually where some irregularities will be taking place. We hope it will not happen come March next year.

R What have you done as a union to improve the situation of Zimbabwe journalists working in this environment?

D We are forging new networks, which we cannot divulge at the moment, but they will see some of our members, especially those from the banned newspapers, accessing further training. Some of our members have also formed an association to monitor the abuse of journalists in the country. But journalists can operate properly only in a free environment.

R What specifically are you doing to help journalists from closed newspapers?

D We have engaged partners locally and internationally to give those journalists further training while their cases are still being settled.

R What has been the impact on press freedom of the sustained attack on journalists and their employers?

D The attack has had a devastating impact. We have lost senior and experienced journalists whose grasp of issues cannot be replaced overnight. They are being succeeded by people with little experience. Most of these [experienced] people were trained using taxpayers’ money. These are resources which are being thrown out of the window, because most of them have left the country. We will soon be carrying out a research study to trace those who have left. We would like to establish a future role for them in Zimbabwe.

A large number of community newspapers have closed because the registration fee demanded under AIPPA was too much for the owners. Journalists who were freelancing for them have lost their jobs.

R Looking at the general situation, are Mugabe's former opponents now resigned to letting him have his way, after the beatings they have suffered and the suppression of free speech? Or is there renewed anger towards his government?

D It would not be fair to say Zimbabweans are resigned to letting the regime have its way. When people are brutalised, raped and denied food because they hold different political opinions, some would appear to side with the regime in order to escape harassment. A dead hero is no use to anybody. Zimbabweans have gallantly tried to stand up to tyranny but they have been ruthlessly suppressed so they have simply devised other ways of dealing with the regime.

R Is the backing of the youth militia for the government solid? Isn’t there disillusionment among government supporters with the way things are run?

D The environment in Zimbabwe is conducive towards creating a youth militia that can be manipulated. The militia was set up at a time when food and jobs were scarce. It provided brighter prospects for jobs, as its graduates were to receive first preference in any recruitment for the civil service. Disillusionment among ruling party supporters? Well naturally. But how do they show it when the punishment is too bloodcurdling to contemplate? That is why you see a lot of Zimbabweans in exile.

R Is the economy continuing downhill or has it improved?

D I am not an economist but my understanding of an improving economy is one in which prices of commodities stabilise or go down, where inflation is reduced, unemployment figures fall and life gets better. In Zimbabwe, inflation, price hikes and unemployment figures have shot through the roof. We just seem to have a different understanding of an improving economy. Maybe if you tell a lie too often, you end up believing it, along with the people you are lying to.

Mugabe’s Windhoek paper faces lawsuit

South Africa’s Sunday Times, largest paper in sub-Saharan Africa, said in June that it is taking legal action to stop President Mugabe and Namibia’s president Sam Nujoma using its name. The Independent in London reported that state-owned publishers in the two countries plan to launch the New Sunday Times, in Windhoek this month, to counter criticism in South Africa and elsewhere. The managing director of New Era, the state-owned paper in Namibia, said the new paper is simply a business venture.

The Sunday Times has exposed abuses in both Namibia and Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean government has accused another South African paper, the Mail & Guardian, of using unaccredited journalists to report on Zimbabwe and of secretly distributing papers there.

Four directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe were in court in June, accused of publishing The Daily News illegally, after a court ordered it be granted a licence.

The Standard’s editor, Bornwell Chakaodza, and a reporter face court in August for alleging that the family of a mine boss’s family blamed officials for his shooting.

Ndjabulo Ncube of The Financial Gazette, Zimbabwe, was a runner-up for the 2004 John Manyarara Investigative Journalism Award, organised by the Media Institute of Southern Africa. He wrote about members of the ruling elite corruptly acquiring farms. The award winner was Jacques Pauw of South African Broadcasting who investigated drug trafficking in Southern Africa. The other runner-up was Patricia McCracken of Bona magazine, who submitted a chilling account of the fire risk from paraffin cooking stoves used by millions of poor people in and around South Africa. Gwen Lister, founder of The Namibian, has been given a Courage in Journalism award by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

More from the CJA’s Trinidad conference

Live TV at low cost

Chris Laird told the CJA conference in Trinidad how Gayelle TV has used simple technology to put live programmes at low cost on local television sets. Traditional media, he said, operate as commercial enterprises. They have to make money to finance huge infrastructures. That is why they are short of local content.

But television is a live medium. Unless you present live programmes, you are wasting it. “We present 16 hours of live original programming every day. Trinidad and Tobago see themselves in live action. Live programming isn’t studio-bound. We are putting cameras in the hands of communities. We are showing people’s films.”

He was speaking in the conference’s final session devoted to Trinidad’s alternative broadcasters. Michael Als said that Radio Toco, supported by Unesco and the UN Development Programme, is one of the leading community stations in the world. It.carries news that matters to the community, rather than news of violence.

Afzal Khan spoke about the 170,000-member Hindu Credit Union’s efforts to provide a voice for people in places not reached by mainstream media. It is about to launch a daily newspaper and a national TV station. “We are not part of the status quo. We aren’t about sensationalism. We are getting away from the norm.”

Listen to journalists of the future

Dominic, a young journalist, told the CJA’s Trinidad conference: “Perhaps the time has come when we must listen more to young people. Too much of newsroom control is by old fogies. The newspaper has to be more and more interactive.” He was speaking in a discussion about the outlook for journalism in 2020, when Trinidad hopes to be a developed nation. Wesley Gibbings of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers said that the new generation are more fearless, more educated, more irreverent, unafraid to ask difficult questions.

Roxane Gibbs, managing editor of The Nation in Barbados, asked how senior journalists are to help the less committed, more restless but computer-literate young people coming into media newsrooms. “They are the people who will be running newsrooms in 2020. We live to work – we are accustomed to 16-hour days. They work to live. They want to have a life.” She said the media need to invest more in their staff, who need to see what is happening, not just undergo training.

Enrico Woolford of the Guyana Press Association said it is still difficult to distribute information from one Caribbean country to another, despite technological advances. “We will stay in the same position unless we look at the infrastructure.”

Murray Burt from Canada asked: “In 2020 will paper still be a vehicle for news? Will Washington be replaced by Beijing as the centre for CNN? Will faith be a major factor?”

Martin Mulligan of the Financial Times, London, mentioned the difficulty of transmitting values, amid fast-changing technology. Barriers are going up between mass-market journalism and niche journalism. On one hand there is a flight from current affairs, on the other a flight into quality for a highly-educated audience. The 2,000-word essay has returned. Business journalism increasingly means investigative journalism and acts as the conscience of the corporate world.

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Caribbean needs regional broadcaster

Claude Robinson, who ran Jamaica Broadcasting before it was privatised, said that the Caribbean needs a pan-Caribbean broadcasting station. Commercial broadcasting appeals to us as consumers, public service broadcasting as citizens. But it is threatened by globalisation, costly technology and competition, and there is no public pressure in its favour. The right to have views is governed by the market place.

Some governments have confused public broadcasting with government broadcasting but government control doesn’t have credibility. Public broadcasters should provide independent, impartial information. They should be responsible to civil society, not government. They need to build alliances with the commercial sector for co-productions. They should reject the view that the marginalisation of public broadcasting is inevitable.

Patrick Cozier of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union said that, on public broadcasting services, “we can tell our own stories, hear our own voices.” Everybody wants public broadcasting but nobody wants to pay for it. Jamaica and Belize have abandoned it. Guyana has an unregulated free-for-all. Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago have a mixture of private and public. Barbados has government broadcasting

He mentioned a proposal for a fund to finance programmes made in the Caribbean. “This is vital for Caribbean civilisation and necessary for the ability to deploy skills in celebration of ourselves. The Caribbean is one of the regions most vulnerable to external influences.”

Carlton Smith from the Bahamas asked if public broadcasters can fund new media units similar to those provided by commercial broadcasters. Does public service broadcasting have to provide all that commerce can? The annual subsidy in the Bahamas depends on government decision. “I believe it should be set by legislation. Survival depends on quality news services. How effectively do we use news programmes in survival?” He said the national service was the only broadcaster in the Bahamas up to 1992. Since then, eight commercial stations and a community TV have been set up. Public broadcasting encourages freedom with responsibility and social development.

Debbie Ransome, head of the BBC Caribbean Service, said the world is now connected by technology but lacks mutual understanding. There is a sense of global dislocation. People fear and distrust other people. Public service broadcasting must inform, educate and entertain, all at the same time. Free from the commercial agenda, it can be distinctive, celebrate diversity and give everyone the chance to have their views heard. The European Union has money which the Caribbean could tap. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t have advertising. The trick is that advertising does not rule the agenda.”

The BBC pulls Caribbean news together. “If the British taxpayer is prepared to put money in, thank God for that. It’s not ‘Thank you, Tony Blair’. It’s ‘Thank you, taxpayer.’”

Other issues

Freedom of the press, said Trinidad senior counsel Martin Daly, is more than freedom of expression. It includes the right to operate publishing machinery without licensing. Trinidad is one of few Caribbean countries where freedom of the press is a constitutional right. In Antigua, where it is not, the Privy Council in London upheld the government’s requirement that publishers pay a bond. Guyana imposed licensing for imports of newsprint.

Ken Gordon of the Trinidad Express outlined Trinidad’s draft Defamation Bill. The Bill combines the law on libel and slander. It introduces a defence of truth as opposed to justification: defining truth could provide a field day for lawyers. The draft Bill allows comment to be defended as in the public interest. It allows a publisher to escape with a statement of explanation or contradiction, provided the person libelled agrees. It allows a defence for wire services, if using copy from established news services. Defamed people must give notice of a complaint within six weeks.

Odette Campbell of Grenada Broadcasting said that a government code of conduct for journalists had been staunchly resisted. The media should be leaders in drawing up a code. Journalists’ training should make them sensitive to ethical issues.

Chris Cobb of the Ottawa Citizen listed ten questions which journalists should ask themselves about a report. It should not harm people unnecessarily. If possible, reporters should not let their sources be anonymous. “Anyone who wants to be published without a name has a motive, and wants to use us.”

Another speaker suggested that unnamed sources could be used in the public interest. Debbie Ransome, of the BBC Caribbean Service, said: “You can’t let your reporters embarrass you [with poorly sourced stories]. We have a two-source rule.” Some sources could not afford to be identified. Dr David Kelly, source of the BBC Today programme’s allegations about the government’s Iraq weapons dossier, killed himself after his identity came to light.

Speaking about the reporting of AIDS and HIV infection, a Trinidad journalist, Tony Fraser said that health is not a big issue in the newsrooms, as are crime and politics. But the threat from AIDS involves both politics and economics. AIDS reporting had been a spectator sport: if it was happening in the Caribbean, it must be in Haiti. But “people were dying in Trinidad and Tobago every day. Are we helping people to come out and tell their stories?”

Sanka Price of the Sunday Nation, Barbados, which has a high reputation for its reporting on AIDS, said: “AIDS has brought into sharp focus what we do in our private lives. Our normal behaviour drives it. Our responsibility [in the media] is bringing as much information to the public as possible.”

News in brief

Bryan Cantley of CJA Canada masterminded the celebration of over 50 years of national newspaper awards. A book From See to See recalls the winning snappers including Ted Dinsmore who, 50 years ago, risked a drenching when he leaned into the darkness of Lake Ontario with a heavy Speed Graphic camera to take a picture of a swimmer completing the first crossing of the lake. Most winning pictures were taken in Canada. But in 1990 Craig Robertson (Toronto Sun) won with a picture of a Kenyan girl holding her small brother. It illustrated a series of articles about AIDS.

Ehsan Ahmed Sehar, president of Pakistan’s National Press Union, has urged rural papers to get on to the internet. This will highlight rural issues and publicise violence against journalists and also the highhandedness of officials and landowners. Union secretary Mazhar Rasheed Missan said that people can chat on the internet about political issues. Shahid Bashir Anjum of Nawa-I-Waqt said voters had been able to question newspaper political writers on the web and explore candidates’ views.

Four Pakistani journalists were arrested on June 12 while trying to cover an army offensive against Islamic groups near the Afghan border.

The government ban on advertising in Nawa-I-Waqt and other newspapers has been attacked by the All Pakistan Newspapers Society. It says the use of government advertising to pressurise newspapers goes against President Musharraf’s assurances.

Nine people, including Bharatiya Janata Party members, were arrested after the ransacking on June 29 of the offices of the daily Mahanagar in Mumbai (Bombay). The attackers were looking for the editor-in-chief, Nikhil Wagle. He was out, so they attacked three other journalists instead. Mahanagar has opposed political extremism.

South African police barred journalists from covering violent conflict between residents and the authorities at Diepsloot, an informal settlement near Johannesburg, on July 7. Diepsloot residents fear expulsion to a rural area.

Police held Kola Oyelere of the Nigerian Tribune for four days in July. They charged him with publishing false information in an article forecasting fresh trouble in Kano, where Muslims have clashed with Christians this year.

Malawi’s High Court on May 31 ordered police to reopen the Malawi Institute of Journalism radio station. Police stormed the station and arrested four broadcasters on May 25 after it broadcast an interview with the opposition’s spokeswoman.

Government threats against the media in Grenada brought a protest from the International Press Institute in June. The government is trying to stop reporting of an allegation that the prime minister took money for appointing a minister.

The deportation order against Roy Clarke of the Post, Zambia, was quashed in April.

We would like to thank the International Freedom of Expression Exchange and the Media Institute of Southern Africa for material used in this newsletter.