Crisis: International
Zimbabwe gov’t monitoring communications
ZIMBABWE PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has signed a law allowing the interception and monitoring of communications transmitted through a telecommunication, postal, or any other related service or system in the country. The new law also provides for the establishment of a monitoring center.
Service providers, among them Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are required to install systems that are “technically capable of supporting lawful interception at all times.”
Media Institute of Southern Africa-Zimbabwe Chairperson Loughty Dube expressed dismay at the promulgation of this act, calling it yet another sad day for his countrymen.
“It is indeed a very sad day for Zimbabweans who for a long time now have had their right to freedom of expression being taken for granted. The government has refused to open the airwaves, closed newspapers and, as if that is not enough, it now wants to pry into people’s conversations. This is simply an indication of a government that is afraid of its own citizens,” Dube said.
What remains now is the publication of a statutory instrument that will advise when the law will become opera-tional.—MISA/IFEX
Editor shot dead in Oakland
AMERICAN JOURNALIST Chauncey Bailey was shot to death on the morning of Aug. 2 on a street in downtown Oakland, United States.
Around 7:30 a.m., an unidentified assailant dressed in black approached Bailey, editor of the weekly paper Oakland Post, while he was on his way to work, according to press reports and interviews by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The gunman shot Bailey several times at close range before fleeing on foot, Oakland police said. Bailey was pronounced dead at the scene.
Oakland police spokesman Roland Holmgren told CPJ that investigators believe Bailey’s shooting was not a random act. “He was apparently targeted,” Holmgren said.
Following a police raid on Aug.3, however, 19-year-old Devaughndre Broussard con-fessed to the murder. Broussard, a handyman and an occasional cook at Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, confessed to local authorities that he shot the editor because he was angered by Bailey’s negative coverage of the bakery and its staff.
Bailey, 58, a veteran television and print journalist in California’s Bay Area, had covered a variety of issues, including city politics and crime, Holmgren said. He had been named editor of the Oakland Post in June. Bailey was an assertive reporter who was respected by his peers, the police spokesman said. Bailey had previously worked as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, covering African-American issues, according to press reports.
Few journalists have been killed in the line of duty in the United States in recent years, CPJ research shows. In 2001, freelance photographer William Biggart was killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and Robert Stevens, a photo editor at The Sun, died of inhalation anthrax in Boca Raton, Florida.
The last targeted assas-sination of a journalist occurred in 1993 when radio reporter Dona St. Plite, a Miami radio reporter of Haitian descent, was gunned down at a benefit. The period from 1976 to 1993 saw a total of 12 journalist killings in the United States.
A 1993 CPJ report, Silenced: The Unsolved Murders of Immigrant Journalists in the United States, found that in all but one case, the victims were immi-grant journalists working in languages other than English. Most received little or no national media attention. —CPJ/IFEX
Chinese cyber-dissident back in jail
ZHU YUFU, a cyber-dissident and pro-democracy activist in China who was released in 2006 after spending seven years in prison, was sentenced to another two years in jail. He was sentenced on last July 16 for pushing a police officer at the time of his arrest last April 19. His son, Zhu Ang, who was arrested at the same time, was given a one-year suspended sentence.
Reporters Without Borders described the sentence as immoral and accused China of breaking its promises and of stepping up human rights violations as the Beijing Olympic Games ap-proached. Normally pushing a police officer at the time of arrest would result in a fine or a short period in detention.
When Zhu was released from prison in 2006, he told The Epoch Times he wanted to resume his activism and tell the world about the mistreatment he underwent in prison. Zhu Yufu spent seven years in prison between June 1999 and September 2006. He was arrested for writing for the China Democracy Party’s magazine and for posting articles on the Internet “critical of the socialist authorities and system.”—RSF/IFEX
Malaysia warns bloggers
THE MALAYSIAN government has threatened to invoke draconian laws against bloggers in what appears to be a move to limit information and free expression ahead of the general elections expected in early 2008.
On July 24, 2007, de facto Law Minister Nazri Abdul Aziz warned that bloggers who write about “sensitive issues” will be slapped with the 1960 Internal Security Act (ISA), the 1948 Sedition Act and Section 121b of the Penal Code, while Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak reminded the media and website operators to be mindful of existing laws when publishing stories that discuss race and religion or risk official action.
The Center for Independent Journalism, a local communication rights watchdog, said Nazri’s statement is the strongest warning yet following a spate of threats leveled against bloggers and online writers over the past months amid rising discontent about religious freedom and political corruption in Malaysia.
The ISA allows for detention without trial and has been repeatedly used to silence critics, while the Sedition Act broadly criminalizes “seditious” speech with up to three years of imprisonment or a 5,000 ringgit fine (approx. US$1,454), or both. Section 121b of the Penal Code concerns the offence of waging war against the King, which carries the death penalty or a life sentence.
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