The Zimbabwe government said on Friday it played no part in the controversial shutting down of the country’s only independent daily paper, a fierce critic of President Robert Mugabe, and vowed not to meddle in the embattled paper’s fate.
”No, the government of Zimbabwe did not shut down the Daily News. We have no time to waste with things like this. We have no interest,” Information and Publicity Minister Jonathan Moyo said at a function to inaugurate a revamped state news agency, the New Ziana.
The Daily News was forcibly shut down by police on September 12, a day after the Supreme Court ruled that it was operating illegally because it was not licenced by a government media commission under the country’s 18-month-old media laws.
The paper had gone to the Supreme Court to challenge the constitutional validity of the media laws compelling all media houses and journalists to register, but the court said it would not entertain its case until it was registered.
”The Daily News is a victim of the rule of law about which it has been preaching since 1999,” Moyo said.
Since the closure and seizure of its equipment, the paper tried to register but its application was rejected by the media commission.
It has since been shuttling between the country’s courts to have the commission’s decision reviewed, and a hearing has now been set for October 16.
Moyo accused the paper of trying to be a law unto itself, of viewing itself ”superior” and said it had not submit its application to register when others did last year.
Had the government wanted to shut down the Daily News, it would have done so long ago, Moyo said.
”They had eight months and 12 days to register, [but] they decided to hell with the law.
”We did not do anything … we would have shut them down during that time they were violating the rules, but we did not,” he said.
”The fate of the Daily News is in the law,” said Moyo. ”There will be no political interference, we will not entertain any pressure from anybody because we respect the law.
”Let the law decide,” Moyo said.
He said 51 media organisations and individuals, some of whom he described as ”imperialist dogs” that publish ”trash” about the country, had registered — but not the Daily News.
”All of these running dogs of imperialism in Zimbabwe that have been around got registered. They were registered because they applied to be registered, all of them, and we know that most of them publish trash. In fact all of them publish trash,” he said.
The type of ”trash” published by the organisations and individuals registered in Zimbabwe would not be published anywhere overseas, he said.
Moyo said private and foreign media in Zimbabwe habitually insult Mugabe, calling the long-time president, among other slurs, a thief.
”Why don’t they say [United States President] George Bush is a thief, and [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair is a thief?” he queried.
”If we were serious people, who do not want to apologise for who we are … really we would shut these papers down because they are trash, they injure our national interest,” he said.
He called the ”lies” about Zimbabwe carried by the American and British international media dangerous ”weapons of mass deception”. — Sapa-AFP