Zimbabwean reporter held without charge
POLICE arrested a journalist in Zimbabwe as she watched officers beat local residents who had been queuing outside a food store.
Rutendo Mawere, of The Standard daily newspaper was taken to the Gweru police station in the Midlands province, where she is being held without charge, even though she holds the required press accreditation from the Zimbabwean Media Information Commission.
Two weeks earlier a freelance photographer was forced to flee Zimbabwe with his family after being attacked and beaten by police. He was accused of owning an improperly registered car.
On July 29, two journalists on the Network Guardian in Kwekwe, Wycliff Nyarota and James Muonwa, were found guilty and fined for “unlawfully and intentionally publishing a false story”.
James Muonwa had reported and named two people caught in a compromising position in a public space and although the judge accepted the story had been properly researched, found that he had been “unprofessional” in writing it. Wycliff Nyarota was held responsible as editor. The two will appeal to the High Court.
Two Zimbabwean journalists have been placed on the European Union’s sanctions list. Munyaradzi Huni and Caesar Zvayi, from the state-owned Sunday Mail and Herald newspapers, will not be allowed into EU territory because of their close ties to the Mugabe regime.
Caesar Zvayi has since been deported from Botswana, where he was working as a lecturer.
THE FACES of more than 2,000 British trade unionists were collaged into portraits of two Zimbabwean union activists, Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, currently on trial in Harare.
The photo-mosaic was assembled by the TUC, which appealed to unions for jpeg mugshots of staff or members for a graphic display at a demonstration against the trial outside the Zimbabwean High Commission in London in July.
The NUJ head office sent a dozen across; somewhere in there are General Secretary Jeremy Dear and Journalist editor Tim Gopsill, who was arrested at a demonstration at the High Commission in 2001.