Harare | Tuesday
THE Zimbabwean government has warned foreign correspondents in the country against demonising it in the eyes of the world, or face the consequences of the law.
In a statement issued late on Monday, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said the ”political band of Harare-based foreign correspondents” must ready themselves ”to be subjected to the judicial process and the last to cry foul when the law is applied to them or their political friends.”
He was criticising a strong statement issued last week by press watchdog the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa) which criticised the government’s arrest of the editor and former publisher of a local private daily newspaper.
Geoff Nyarota and Wilf Mbanga, editor and former chief executive of the Daily News, were arrested last week on fraud charges. The Misa statement dismissed the arrests as unjustified.
Moyo accused Misa and Harare-based foreign correspondents of ”criticising or demonising the people of Zimbabwe and their Government”.
Several foreign correspondents have this year been expelled from Harare.
In the meantime, Zimbabwe’s government and Britain have agreed to speed up the implementation of an agreement under which Britain will fund land reforms in its former colony, the state-run Herald newspaper said on Tuesday.
The Herald said Zimbabwe’s foreign minister Stan Mudenge and his British counterpart Jack Straw met on the sidelines of the 56th United Nations General Assembly in New York at the weekend and agreed that land reform should be ”speedily implemented”.
Quoting Zimbabwe’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Tichaona Jokonya, the paper was told Mudenge also met Mark Malloch Brown, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) administrator.
”It was technical really — the meetings were all centred around the resettlement and the Zimbabwe Joint Resettlement Initiative (ZJRI),” Jokonya told the newspaper.
Under the ZJRI, Zimbabwe’s white farmers have agreed to hand over a million hectares of land to the government for redistribution to landless blacks. – Sapa