From The Mail & Guardian (SA), 15 February

Harare – Zimbabwean police on Monday questioned Jan Raath, correspondent for the German news agency DPA, and three other journalists over allegations of “spying” and of working illegally as reporters, lawyers confirmed. The questioning was the latest in what observers said appeared to be a new crackdown by President Robert Mugabe’s government against locally-based foreign correspondents and independent journalists ahead of parliamentary elections on March 31. Two teams of police arrived separately at Raath’s office in central Harare and questioned him and the other three journalists over what they said was “a tip-off the journalists were involved in spying”. The accusations followed the arrest of five senior figures in Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF party in December on charges of selling “economic and political information to South African intelligence agents”. The first police team to arrive at Raath’s office carried out a brief search and told him that they were investigating possible violations of the Official Secrets Act, under which it is an offence to expose classified state information. They left after about an hour, when the officer in charge said there appeared to be no sign of espionage activities. An hour later, a second team arrived, from the police law and order section, and questioned Raath and the others about their official accreditation as journalists by the state-controlled Media and Information Commission. “It’s harassment, said Beatrice Mtetwa, Raath’s lawyer.”Police came to their office with three different sets of allegations, so it’s obvious they don™t know what to charge them with. They [police] are looking for a reason to lock them up.”

Under press-gag laws introduced in 2002, journalists may only work with the sanction of the Media and Information Commission. Working “illegally” as a journalist carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail. Raath and several other locally-based foreign correspondents have applied each year since the draconian law came into force, but the commission has never made a decision on whether to approve or deny their applications. The new law states that journalists may continue to work until the commission denies their applications. Raath said that at 2.30am on Monday, hours before he was questioned, a car with two men arrived at the locked gate of his residence and hooted, banged on the gate, and tried to force it open. They fled as soon as the alarm was switched on, but observers said the noisy attempted entry was a tactic frequently used by Zimbabwe’s notorious secret police to intimidate targets. In another move against the press, the government last week resuscitated three-year-old charges against veteran local columnist Pius Wakatama for “reporting falsehoods”. The allegation referred to an article detailing the case of a group of workers who had been illegally evicted from a white-owned farm at the height of the invasion of white-owned land in 2002. More than a million farm workers and their family members have been displaced by the occupation of formerly white-owned farmlands by landless black farmers. Farm production has fallen and, combined with unfavourable weather, triggered the need for massive food aid over the past years. In previous decades, Zimbabwe was one of the few countries in Africa that could feed itself.

Source: WWW.ZwNews.Com