The offices of Zimbabwe’s Voice of the People (VOP) radio station have been destroyed by a fire bomb, its reporters have been beaten and jailed, its broadcasts jammed and now its directors face government charges that could see them jailed.
Yet all involved in this plucky shortwave station remain committed to continuing their broadcasts of independent reports into Zimbabwe. The station’s perseverance against the media repression of President Robert Mugabe’s government has won VOP the One World Media special award.
”This is a great recognition of our determination to give a voice to the voiceless people of Zimbabwe,” said the station’s executive director John Masuku, on receiving the award in London last week.
It is a dangerous and difficult task, as Zimbabwe’s government has used repressive media laws to close four newspapers, expel foreign correspondents and ban all private radio and television broadcasts.
The VOP team operates openly in Zimbabwe with six full-time journalists and 15 freelancers. It gets around the draconian media regulations by not broadcasting from Zimbabwe. Instead it sends its reports to Radio Netherlands where they are broadcast back into Zimbabwe via a relay transmitter in Madagascar.
”We use digital technology to send our reports to Holland via e-mail,” explains journalist Shorayi Kuriwa who has worked for the station for five years.
In August 2002, Kuriwa narrowly missed being killed. He left VOP’s Harare offices after midnight, as he had been preparing material to be sent to The Netherlands. ”About 10 minutes after I left work, a huge bomb blast blew the roof off the building and destroyed it. Thankfully, no one was injured but the force of the fire melted all our equipment,” he says.
”It was frightening but we decided this is a mission and not just a job, and we must carry on.” Two years later, Kuriwa was beaten by government supporters and suffered a broken nose and an injured leg. He has been arrested so many times that he refers to the Harare police station as his ”second home”.
Established in 2000, as Zimbabwe’s political, economic and humanitarian crisis took hold, VOP broadcasts an hour-long programme of news, opinion and debate in Zimbabwe’s three main languages: English, Shona and Ndebele. It receives funding from the Dutch group, Hivos, the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Initiative and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
The station often has interviews with government officials. ”That is some of our most dangerous work,” says reporter Davison Mudzingwa. ”During the parliamentary elections in 2005, we tried to interview candidates from Zanu-PF. Some of them were very hostile and threatened to arrest us.” However, such broadcasts are important because the state-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation has become such an instrument of government propaganda.
Against the odds, VOP has won a listenership that it estimates at about 500 000 people, based on the letters it receives. In Zimbabwe, people must tune into the station secretly because of possible retribution by the government, such as the withdrawal of food aid.
”In the rural areas, people have ‘listeners’ clubs’ where they listen to our programmes. It’s encouraging to know that we have devoted listeners,” says Mudzingwa.
Two other shortwave stations broadcast into Zimbabwe, SW Radio Africa from London and Studio 7 from the Voice of America in Washington. Unlike VOP, they operate from their foreign studios and interview Zimbabweans over the telephone.
The VOP, though, will not have long to celebrate its award. The directors of the station, including human rights lawyer Arnold Tsunga, appeared in a Zimbabwean court this week on charges of operating a radio station without a licence.
”We have a passion for radio, for getting real news, balanced news on to the airwaves,” says Masuku. — Â