Another day, another death list. Despite having an arsenal of anti-press laws at his disposal, the leader of Zimbabwe’s military junta, Robert Mugabe, has resorted to using brute force and the threat of assassination to silence the independent media. Yet another list, prepared by Mugabe’s much-loathed Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), is doing the rounds of internet websites. I take a cursory look at the list, and yawn. The same old names are there – all the stalwarts of our profession who endeavour constantly to bring to the world’s attention through our writings the appalling atrocities being committed in the name of sovereignty by the Mugabe regime.

Mugabe has ruled the beautiful and well-endowed country he liberated from colonial rule since 1980. In the process he has reduced it to a begging bowl – with more than a quarter of the population in exile and where the world’s highest inflation and lowest life expectancy have reduced the noble ambitions of majority rule to blood-stained tatters.

Nobody on those lists panics – we’ve seen and heard it all before. Mugabe’s dirty tricks department has been circulating similar ones since 2000. We know this is just another hazard of working as a Zimbabwean journalist – our so-called President wants to kill us. I’m sure many other world leaders would like to murder the journalists who snap at their heels day by day, exposing their weaknesses, holding them accountable, bringing their dark secrets and craven self-serving into the light, but they don’t actually send out armed thugs on government pay to thrash, maim and kill them.

Many of us have been harassed in numerous ways in the past 10 years. We’ve been arrested and some have been beaten and tortured. One has been killed. This is the risk we take. If we don’t, the story doesn’t get told. And this story must be told – the world must know the full extent of Mugabe’s cruelty. It’s not just a job for us – it’s a passion. We are men and women on a mission. Our words are our weapons. There is no money in it. With inflation running at nine million per cent it’s hard to make money at anything in Zimbabwe today. But we are determined not to let the sword triumph. Not to allow the darkness of Mugabe’s news blackout ever to be complete.

Since his power began to wane in the late 1990s, Mugabe has seen the independent media as his enemy. In 1998, the establishment of the country’s first independent national daily, The Daily News, with its exposure of misgovernance and corruption, and the paper’s huge public appeal, rattled his cage. He ordered the arrest and torture by the Army of journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto. Both were eventually released, but Chavunduka died a few years later. Then Mugabe lost the 1999 constitutional referendum and faced the spectre of electoral defeat at the general elections in 2000 by the newly-formed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The battle lines were drawn. He unleashed an onslaught against the media that has worsened with each passing year.

Bombed, banned and kidnapped

Mugabe’s battle against the media hit a new low in 2003 with the passing of the misnamed Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). This draconian legislation made it mandatory for all journalists and media organisations operating inside the country to be registered – policed – by the Media and Information Commission (MIC). Headed by an unashamed Mugabe apologist, Tafataona Mahoso, the MIC holds the dubious honour of having closed down five independent newspapers, including The Daily News and its sister Sunday, in its first two years of existence.

During Mahoso’s reign, countless journalists have been harassed, arrested, beaten, tortured, locked up and released without being charged. Among them was Gift Phiri, chief reporter for the independent weekly, The Zimbabwean, who was tortured and had his finger broken by Mugabe’s goons in police uniform. A cameraman has been killed. More reporters have been arrested in the past five years than during the first two decades of independence. In all these cases, there has not been a single conviction. The journalists have all been locked up, abused, and finally – and reluctantly – released on the orders of brave magistrates. The AIPPA legislation was also used to clamp down on international journalists, resulting in a virtual news blackout outside the country. A few brave Western journalists have made it into the country from time to time, usually masquerading as tourists, and their reports of economic and social collapse have stunned the world. But after a brief glimpse, the curtain closed again, and Zimbabwe was absent from the international media for months at a time.

This year’s general and presidential election, which Mugabe lost to the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai, made the previous decade’s media repression look like a grandmothers’ tea party. On the eve of the March 29 poll, the main 45-minute state-controlled ZBC/TV News broadcast 43 minutes coverage of Mugabe’s election campaign, with only a brief and derogatory mention of rival presidential candidates Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni, in which it accused them of being puppets of the British and stooges of the West. One Zimbabwean analyst said, during the election period, that ZBC/TV would have “made Goebbels proud”. And yet chief executive Henry Muradzikwa and seven top executives were fired for not being enthusiastic enough about Mugabe and allowing a few MDC election adverts to slip through the net. No such slips would be acceptable for the June 27 presidential run-off election. And indeed none happened.

Despite Tsvangirai pulling out because of massive violence against his supporters, which saw more than 100 killed, 500 missing presumed killed, thousands injured and more than 200,000 internally displaced, Mugabe went ahead with the election and crowned himself ruler of Zimbabwe for a sixth term. Before, during and after both polls, the state-controlled media went into overdrive – its ham-fisted spin and sickeningly blatant deception would have been laughable had it not been so tragic.

AIPPA was used to control rigidly media coverage of the elections. Exorbitant registration fees were charged and only a handful of foreign correspondents accredited. Major media groups such as the Associated Press, South Africa’s E-TV, U.S. broadcasters CNN and MSNBC, and the BBC were all blocked from receiving accreditation.

Joel Simon, director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said recently: “Once again, draconian press laws are being used to silence the press in Zimbabwe, despite purported reforms made last year. After years of systematic harassment and intimidation of the media, this latest attempt at censorship makes a mockery of the entire electoral process.”

Lined up against Mugabe was a small array of independent voices – the local weeklies The Independent, Financial Gazette and Sunday Standard (producing fewer than 30,000 copies a week between them), the London-based SW Radio Africa, South Africa-based Voice of the People and the US-based VOA Studio 7. The Zimbabwean – a serious independent weekly tabloid, had joined them in early 2005. Exploiting a loophole in AIPPA, The Zimbabwean is published outside the country and trucked in from South Africa for sale every Thursday.

Desperate hunger for information

The first issue to arrive at Beit Bridge border post in June was slapped with the new duty – £5000 for 100,000 copies – by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority. We reeled at the audacity of it and fulminated at the injustice of this diabolical strategy. We slashed the print run for the Thursday edition to 60,000 and scraped together all our resources – meant to last the rest of the year – to get another three issues of the Sunday edition published and into the country. But we could not go on. Frantic proposals to donors elicited funding for another truck and 100 tons of newsprint, and cheques poured in from well-wishers in response to British newspaper reports, but the figures were just too astronomical. We were forced to suspend publication of The Zimbabwean on Sunday after the issue of June 22 this year. We have managed to secure funding to get 60,000 copies of The Zimbabwean into the country each week for a short period. After that, who knows?

Several international organisations, including the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), have responded to our plea to condemn the duty and demand its removal. WAN and the World Association of Editors have written to Mugabe to protest. Needless to say, they have had no response. In the meantime, the reign of terror back home continues. Thanks to modern technology and brave MDC and civil society activists the international media receives a steady flow of information and pictures illustrating the junta’s bloody reign of terror. The few remaining journalists inside the country play hide-and-seek with the police and do not sleep at home. Many have left for safer climes.

But back to the latest death threat. My eye catches a final paragraph: “The majority of those named on the list, although they are living in the bliss and security of the Diaspora and the anonymity of cyberspace, their family members will not be so lucky.” It’s a chilling development. They are now threatening to harm our families. And we know this is no idle threat. Despite, for centuries, the family being sacrosanct in Zimbabwean culture and never before threatened, horror has gone to new heights in recent weeks. This flies in the face of everything decent. The unthinkable has become reality. It would appear from the most recent reports that Rwandan mercenaries are at the root of this latest development.

I and my fellow journalists have chosen to take up the weapon of words against Mugabe’s guns. We are prepared to face the repercussions of our actions. Some have already paid the ultimate sacrifice. But not my children. A line must be drawn somewhere, and very soon.