Zimbabweans use blogs, text messages for info

By SABRINA SHANKMAN

Associated Press Writer

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The photographs of the tortured body of an opposition official are blurry but chilling.

Posted on the "This is Zimbabwe" blog, they show charred, lacerated limbs and blank eyes staring out from the face of the official, Gift Mutsvungunu, frozen in a death grimace. A note accompanying the pictures says the picture quality is bad because the photographer was shaking with fear.

Increasingly, Zimbabweans are going online and using cell phone text messages to share stories of life and death in a country where independent traditional media have been all but silenced, and from which reporters from most international media have been barred.

"Any organization or NGO working in the area of promotion of free expression is at risk," Bev Clark, one of the founders of the Kubatana blogging forum, said via e-mail. "Zimbabwe is encased in fear."

Harare-based Kubatana is a network of nonprofit organizations that runs a blogging forum. The forum relies on 13 bloggers in Zimbabwe, who e-mail submissions to an administrator who posts them to the site. The network also reaches beyond the Web by sending text messages to 3,800 subscribers.

Zimbabwe's bloggers are mainly opposition activists whose themes range from HIV/AIDS to the country's economic meltdown to President Robert Mugabe's thuggery. The underground networks can be forums for unsubstantiated rumor, but they also provide valuable independent information and can even make news.

In late June, the "This is Zimbabwe" blog started a letter-writing campaign against a German firm that was supplying paper for the sinking Zimbabwean dollar. After about a week, the international media picked up the story and the company, Giesecke & Devrient, announced it would stop dealing with Zimbabwe.

Another typical posting simply lists names of victims of political violence, each accompanied by one sentence on how the person was beaten to death.

In many cases it's impossible to tell who is doing the postings because the risks are so great. Government eavesdroppers are believed to be roaming the Web and intercepting cell phone calls, especially after a law was passed last year allowing authorities to monitor phone calls and the Internet.

Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga said the legislation was modeled after counter-terrorism legislation in America and the U.N.

"Those who have something to hide should be very much worried, but those who have nothing to hide should not worry," he said.

Only the state-run TV and radio stations and The Herald, a government newspaper, provide daily news in Zimbabwe. There are no independent radio stations broadcasting from within the country. Journalists without hard-to-come-by government accreditation find it hard to operate.

The government grip on the media tightened in the lead-up to last month's presidential election run-off, in which Mugabe was the only candidate after opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai dropped out because of violence against his supporters.

That leaves the Internet and cell phones. Internet World Stats, an online organization that compiles statistics on Internet usage worldwide, estimates 1.3 million Zimbabweans -- about 11 percent of the population -- were using the Internet as of March 2008. According to the CIA World Factbook, 832,500 Zimbabweans, or 6.7 percent of the population, had cell phones as of 2006.

For those who are online, near-daily power outages, followed by power surges, can make the Web an inconsistent means of communicating and gathering information. Cell phone service is also inconsistent at best; it can sometimes take hours to send text messages.

SW Radio Africa, a station based outside London that broadcasts into Zimbabwe, sends texts to 25,000 listeners a day, and they are adding about a thousand numbers each week.

Gerry Jackson, an exiled Zimbabwean journalist who started SW Radio Africa, said the text messages are their most popular service. And it's not just one-way.

The radio station has a local phone number in Zimbabwe so listeners can send text messages or leave voicemail messages without long distance charges, and then someone from the station can call them back.

"One of the guys was calling back a woman who had said the youth militia were after her," Jackson said. As he was on the phone with her, someone broke down her door and started beating her, and all he could hear were screams.

"It's very frustrating sitting at this distance and watching your country be destroyed at every conceivable level," Jackson said.

Eight years ago, Jackson won a court battle in Zimbabwe's Supreme Court to run an independent radio station -- but it was shut down by armed gunmen just six days after its launch. She fled to London, where she started SW Radio Africa in 2001.

Radio stations broadcasting into Zimbabwe from outside are forced to broadcast on multiple frequencies to avoid being jammed by the government.

A recently imposed import duty on newspapers charges a 40 percent tax for independent voices like the newspaper The Zimbabwean, published abroad and shipped in and available on the Web.

The Zimbabwean's publisher, Wilf Mbanga, said weekly circulation has dropped from 200,000 to 60,000 and the paper has stopped publishing its Sunday edition.

"We are not going to be defeated," said Mbanga, who continues to publish using donations from international humanitarian organizations.