Southern African media under pressure
By Darren Schuettler
Pressure on journalists, the banning of publications and charges that some media foment right-wing plots have raised concern that press freedom is under renewed threat across southern Africa, political analysts say.
In the week since African journalists gathered in Namibia to mark World Press Freedom Day, Swaziland has banned two publications critical of the kingdom's royal family.
Zimbabwe has warned journalists who are seen as supporting opposition to President Robert Mugabe that they face violence.
"I think press freedoms are more under threat now than they were three or four years ago," said Luckson Chipare, regional director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA).
"In some countries it has been an issue of governance, while in others we've seen a trend toward racialising issues that we should try to avoid," he told Reuters.
MISA condemned Swaziland's banning of The Guardian newspaper and The Nation magazine, saying it effectively silenced a free press in one of the world's last remaining absolute monarchies.
Last week police confiscated all copies of the Guardian, and MISA said it had received reports that police had harassed or interrogated journalists from the two publications.
But the press in the country has come under official criticism for its coverage of King Mswati's recent illness and speculation that one of his eight wives had poisoned him.
The king has since said that he was suffering from a stress-related illness.
"It is clear (the government) was operating under orders from the palace. With every new form of expression, government finds a way to ban it," said Jan Sithole, Secretary-General of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions.
ZIMBABWE WARNS "GUTTER PRESS"
In Zimbabwe, the Mugabe government has intensified a campaign against what it calls the gutter press.
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo reportedly warned independent media last week that they must expect violence if they continue "pushing a political agenda for the opposition".
The editor of the Daily News, the country's biggest independent newspaper, was also questioned by police after accusations that the paper had criminally defamed Mugabe.
The allegations stem from a report on a lawsuit filed in the United States against the president by victims of political violence during parliamentary elections last year.
A more subtle form of pressure in Namibia and Botswana has seen government advertising pulled from independent newspapers which published critical articles.
South Africa's media have plunged into a week of self-analysis after a group of black professionals accused the mainly white-owned media of an "apartheid-style disinformation campaign" against the president and other black leaders.
"There is a very perceptible and increasingly strident campaign against black people in powerful positions," the group of 11 business people and academics said in a full-page advert.
Mbeki has come under withering criticism for his controversial views on AIDS, his soft approach to Zimbabwe, and more recently his support for a criminal probe into an alleged plot from within the ranks of the ruling African National Congress to oust the president.
Two weeks ago, the weekly Mail & Guardian asked if Mbeki was fit to rule. It defended its editorial line by saying that questioning and challenging government was part of a healthy democracy.
"For a full-on functioning democracy, we need an independent, non-sycophantic press," the paper said on Friday.
South Africa's National Editors Forum said the country's media should not be "praise-singers" for the government, but the advert's theme had clearly struck a chord with many readers.
"It seems white newspapers get a kick out of denouncing blacks, insulting us and trying to make us fight each other and dividing us," one person wrote in a letter to a South African newspaper this week.
Last month, local newspapers debated a leading journalist's allegation that Mbeki was a "womaniser" N an accusation the ANC later called a "declaration of war".
Political analyst Sipho Seepe said the advert reflected the fact that ownership of the press remained predominately in white hands seven years after the end of apartheid.
"It raises concerns that resonate with black experiences in traditionally white places - whether it be in the media, universities or in business - that deals with the unfinished business of social transformation," Seepe said this week.
- Reuters
Published on the Web by IOL on 2001-05-13 12:51:01
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