SpringfieldNewsSun.com

The March 29 elections in Zimbabwe had just ended when the nightmare of many journalists began.

Police raided their hotels and arrested those they could find, including the New York Times' Barry Bearak and other reporters from Britain, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Some were accused of "obstructing justice;" others charged with covering the election "without accreditation" under a law used to restrict media outlets and journalists deemed "anti-government."

The arrest and detention of journalists in Zimbabwe may have shocked the international community. But it is nothing new to African journalists, who are routinely persecuted for trying to expose government corruption and other injustices in their countries.

More than 180 journalists have been murdered in Africa since 1992, about 300 jailed and six disappeared without a trace, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media rights advocacy group.

Just last year in Zimbabwe, freelance cameraman Edward Chikomba was abducted and murdered shortly after he shot and disseminated photographs and video clips of opposition political leaders being brutally beaten by state police at a 2007 prayer breakfast.

To avoid persecution, thousands of African journalists — including about 3,000 Zimbabwean journalists and journalism graduates — have fled into exile in the United States and other countries considered safe havens, according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of African Journalists, a media advocacy group.

President Robert Mugabe's government has banned at least eight Zimbabwean journalists from returning to this southern Africa country, named by the Committee to Protect Journalists as having among the world's most repressive media laws.

Arrests, deportation

Many of the arrested journalists have been released; some have been deported, and the persecution continues.

"The treatment of journalists in Zimbabwe is absolutely outrageous," said Robert Mahoney, deputy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. "It's unfortunate that the rest of the world is not helping the journalists in Zimbabwe."

There is no private daily newspaper or broadcast medium in Zimbabwe. The government shut down the dailies and refuses to issue licenses for private ownership of broadcast media. In 2001, the Mugabe government established the Media and Information Commission and Access to Information Protection and Privacy Act to regulate media practice.

"Those are laws that are ... well, primitive; laws that don't allow individuals to express themselves," said Thuso Khumalo, an exiled Zimbabwean journalist in South Africa and a stringer for the Voice of America. "All journalists writing the truth about Zimbabwe at the moment have been termed enemies of the state."

The government's view

Machivenyika Mapuranga, Zimbabwe's ambassador to the United States, said the media reforms were necessary to give citizens access to information in public offices and to safeguard their privacy. Journalists fleeing the country, he says, must have violated the law. Others resisting the reforms work for political opponents funded by the British government and its allies to overthrow a duly elected Mugabe government, he said.

"With all due respect to the American government, those media laws pale in comparison to the Patriot Act," he said.

Once regarded as a national hero for his role in the liberation struggle that culminated in Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, Mugabe, 84, has since become a villain to many, especially the American and British governments. Among his controversial acts, the government seized lands from white farmers and gave them to blacks.

"The problem is that Britain and the United States are yet to realize that Zimbabwe is an independent sovereign nation that will not take dictation from them," Mapuranga said.

The ambassador said the Mugabe government is falsely accused of stifling the independent press, noting that opposition publications such as The Standard, The Independent and The Financial Gazette still operate in Zimbabwe without government intervention.

'National interest'

He said the government's decision not to permit independent broadcast outlets is in Zimbabwe's national interest.

"It is a country under siege, and we do not want the British and the Americans to mislead our people, especially after declaring that they are working for a change of regime in Zimbabwe."

Mapuranga said it is ridiculous to think that the Zimbabwean government had any involvement in Chikomba's abduction and death, and that the Mugabe government has not banned any citizen from returning to the country.

The Zimbabwean government has admitted its attempts to jam broadcast signals from external outlets, such as the Voice of America's Zimbabwe service and London-based SW Africa Radio owned by Gerry Jackson, an exiled journalist.

Jackson once obtained a Supreme Court judgment to operate a private radio station in Zimbabwe. However, six days into operation, Mugabe issued an executive order against private ownership, and the station was shut down at gunpoint, according to Jackson, who fled to Britain.

Election cloudy

Praxedes Jeremiah, vice president-broadcast at the National Association of African Journalists, had hoped that Mugabe — who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years — would be voted out of office in the last elections. That, she said, would have given thousands of exiled Zimbabwean journalists the option to return home.

But more than a month after the presidential elections, Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai are headed for a runoff election because neither had more than 50 percent of the initial votes required for an outright win.

"Before the election, I was hoping for change, because the people are just fed up," said Jeremiah, an editor and producer at Studio 7, a Zimbabwe service at the U.S. government-funded Voice of America, operated mostly with exiled Zimbabwean journalists like her.

"They're dying of starvation," Jeremiah said of fellow Zimbabweans. "The inflation rate is 160,000."

"Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa — and indeed all of Africa — now it's a wastebasket," said Jeremiah, one of only a handful of exiled Zimbabwean journalists still employed in the media.

Sandra Nyaira, a former political editor at Zimbabwe's Daily News and volunteer coordinator of exiled Zimbabwean journalists in the United Kingdom, says she and several of her colleagues have not been able to find full-time media jobs.

"So many are on the streets, so many are selling tomatoes," said Nyaira, a "Courage Award" recipient from the International Women's Media Foundation, which recognizes female journalists who risk their lives by reporting in hostile environments.

Jane Ransom, executive director of the D.C.-based International Women's Media Foundation, said she is appalled that world leaders and several media and human-rights groups have been silent about the persecution of journalists in Africa.

Randy Smith, a deputy managing editor at The Kansas City Star, is not surprised. Most of the international community, he said, seems unaware of the lack of press freedom in Africa.

"I think that the general person on the street is poorly informed about what's going on in Africa in general and with journalists in particular," said Smith, who spent a couple of months working with journalists in Africa.

Sunday Dare, author of "Guerrilla Journalism: Dispatches from the Underground," is familiar with the situation in Zimbabwe.

"Any government that is unwilling or incapable of protecting and respecting the fundamental rights of its people will always try to censor the media or try to jail media practitioners," said Dare, a bureau chief at Voice of America whose book chronicles the travails and defiance of Nigerian journalists during the era of successive military dictatorships.

'Continent let us down'

From his South African base, Khumalo blames African leaders for the situation in Zimbabwe.

"The whole of the continent has let us down," he said. "African leaders are not brave enough to tell each other that this is a democratic era, and they should do that."

Despite sharing a common plight, Zimbabwe's exiled journalists are not always united. But they are bonded with a common wish.

"Journalists are divided along tribal lines and political affiliations," Jeremiah said. "But I don't think any of us want Mugabe back."

Eyobong Ita, a Nigerian-born journalist, is an assistant city editor at the Springfield News-Sun and the founder and president of the National Association of African Journalists. He began researching this article as a 2007 fellow at the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University.

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