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EDITOR'S DESK

Voices in the wind

by Judi McLeod

September 22, 2003

There’s been an eerie silence in faraway Zimbabwe since last Friday. Robert Mugabe’s brutal government has shut down the Daily News, the country’s lone independent daily newspaper.

Add to the status quo that Zimbabwe has taken a back seat in the international news media, whose collective eye is on the Middle East, and the silence in Zimbabwe becomes deafening.

The government media commission, on Friday refused the Daily News licence to publish, effectively silencing its voice.

"With one stroke of the pen, a body which is not democratically accountable has made a decision that denies the people of Zimbabwe their fundamental right to freedom of expression," said Daily News chief executive Sam Sipepa Nkomo.

Under a highly controversial law enacted by the high-handed President Mugabe in March 2002, all media in Zimbabwe are required to register with the Media and Information Commission or risk closure.

"Initially, the Daily News refused to apply for registration," reports Karen Kleiss in the Toronto Star’s Rights Watch. "It declared the law unconstitutional and attempted to challenge it before the Supreme Court.

"But on Sept. 11, the court ruled that the newspaper must be in compliance with the law in order to contest it. And so, on Monday, the Daily News applied to register in an effort to proceed with its case.

"The application was rejected."

The rejection, for sure was widely anticipated. The four-year-old independent daily--the only news source not controlled by the government in the country of 11 million--has been relentlessly critical of Mugabe’s regime, routinely exposing high-level corruption and rights abuses, and breaking stories on the deterioration of the rule of law.

There was precious little reported by the international media, and no intervention from the United Nations when the paper’s presses were blown up three years ago, or when its editors and journalists were jailed and harassed, or when the little people who distribute the paper on the streets were being routinely beaten.


Among a long list of human rights abuses, the closing of the Daily News follows a little more than a year to the August 8, 2002 anniversary of Mugabe’s massive land grab, which took away the private farms of more than 3,000 farmers.

The silence of Zimbabwe renders courageous leaders of the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change, including Roy Bennett, to voices crying in the wind.

I was marked for life by the courage of Bennett, when I had the opportunity of meeting him at a downtown Toronto hotel in August of 2002.

Mugabe goons had invaded his Charleswood coffee plantation in the foothills of the Chimanimani Mountains in May of 2001. His workers were chased down and beaten, his cattle killed and eaten. Bennett’s wife, Heather, who had a pistol held to her throat, miscarried their baby.

Bennett had come to Canada to meet with the mainline media. Only three journalists showed any interest, the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington, a single television outlet, and myself.

So moved was I by Bennett’s true story, I asked him wouldn’t it be better to take his family and flee.

"You can’t run away from everything," he calmly told me. "There are some things in life worth taking a stand for."

Since that day, I have lost touch with Bennett. But I do know that he has since been picked up on fictitious charges and was seriously beaten while he was incarcerated.

Released from prison, he was back on the front lines of the battle.

There is no cut-and-run mentality in this man who is so much more farmer, husband, and father than politician.

They may have silenced Zimbabwe’s only daily newspaper, but even Robert Mugabe cannot stop the free communication of the masses, the Internet.

So, it is from this website that I send via the Internet, the same message I wrote to Bennett, one year ago. "Someday there will be peace in Zimbabwe, and when it comes Roy Bennett, who embodies the true meaning of the power of one, he will be working the land of his coffee plantation."

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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