Harare | Thursday
ZIMBABWEAN authorities are searching for several foreign journalists who entered the country as tourists in defiance of a ban on most visiting correspondents, a senior government official said on Thursday.
The state controlled daily Herald said that its ”investigations” established that reporters from Britain’s Guardian and Telegraph newspapers, the London-based Economist, South Africa’s Sunday Times ”and a few other foreign scribes” had declared themselves as holidaymakers on arrival here and were illegally working as journalists.
Several of the ”illegal” journalists have been covering the worsening repression in the run-up to presidential elections in March and their reports have been published under their names in their newspapers.
”Our net is closing in on them and we should be able to account for all of them by the end of the day,” said George Charamba, secretary for the department of information.
Visiting journalists have to obtain accreditation from the information department before being allowed into the country. Early last year, the regime ended its previously open policy and only a handful of foreign correspondents have been granted accreditation.
It says the BBC is ”banned” from coming here.
”What makes the whole development quite sinister is the fact that these journalists have got intelligence cover from a hostile state because they are on assignment,” Charamba said, without explanation.
The Herald claimed the journalists were staying in hotels and ”MDC safe houses.”
The announcement came as deepening confusion surrounded controversial information minister Jonathan Moyo’s attempt to introduce new press laws that will allow the regime to shut down the country’s independent press, stop its journalists working, and cut off reporting to the outside world of the escalating crisis in the country.
Wednesday’s debate on the bill was delayed for the fourth time in just over a week, amid signs of angry opposition to the bill from MPs of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
Meanwhile, a journalist from Madagascar who had planned to spend her vacation with friends in Zimbabwe was turned away when she arrived at the airport in Harare, she said from Johannesburg.
Nivo Sahondra Randriamasimanana, a journalist for a French magazine, Capricorne, was allowed to stay at the airport only a few minutes before being put on the first plane leaving for Johannesburg.
Passports from Madagascar state the holder’s profession, and when immigration authorities saw the word ”journalist” they did not even ask whether she had come to Zimbabwe for work or for tourism, she said.
”They really treated me like a criminal,” Randriamasimanana said. Tourists to Zimbabwe can normally pay for a visa at the airport in Harare, but journalists coming to report on the country must apply one month in advance from their home country for a special visa. – Sapa, AFP
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