• Population: 12,835,000
  • Internet users: 500,000 (2002)
  • Average charge for 20 hours of connection: 18 euros
  • DAI*: 0.29
  • Situation**: difficult

After cracking down on press freedom, President Robert Mugabe is now targeting the Internet. Zimbabwe is one of the few sub-Saharan countries to have passed legislation specifically regulating online activities. The opposition have become cyber-dissidents and are using the Internet to organise.

The Internet is growing fast in Zimbabwe. It is still limited to an elite, because its cost is prohibitive for most of the population, but it is used more and more by opposition movements, which send out news bulletins by e-mail. This allows them both to disseminate their views and to quickly mobilise supporters for demonstrations. Discussion forums that refer to the political situation have developed fast in recent years, as have activist sites such as www.kubatana.net.

The Internet is also used by independent newspapers to evade the regime's censorship. But while it may be easy to set up a website displaying the content of a banned newspaper, it is still very hard to get an online publication to pay its way. Furthermore, in a country in which barely 4 per cent of the population goes online, a website clearly does not have the same impact as a printed newspaper.

The government, which has cracked down harder on press freedom than any other in southern African, has realised that the independent press and opposition have turned to the Internet. Alarmed by the new media's growing popularity, the regime is trying to gag it. President Robert Mugabe told the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in December 2003 that, "beneath the rhetoric of free press and transparency is the iniquity of hegemony." The quest for an information society should not come at the expense of building a sovereign national society," he added.

Repressive law

The government adopted the Post and Telecommunications Act (PTA), regulating online activities, in November 2000. It allows the security services to monitor phone calls and e-mail and obliges ISPs and other operators belonging to the Computer Society of Zimbabwe to supply information to the authorities on request and give police and intelligence officials access to their equipment. It is not known how much use has been made of these provisions.

E-mail interception

A group of lawyers asked the supreme court to rule on the constitutionality of the articles in the PTA concerning the interception of phone calls and e-mail. They claimed that the act violated article 20 of the constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and the right to receive and share information without hindrance. The act gives the authorities inordinate powers to monitor phone calls and e-mail. The lawyers said President Mugabe was free to order the interception of e-mail messages without any safeguards against abuse.

In response, the supreme court ruled in early March 2004 that sections 98 and 103 of the PTA - concerning interception - were indeed unconstitutional. The court said the constitution made allowance for a degree of encroachment on freedom of expression but it argued that the PTA's concept of "reasonably justified" interception was too vague to guarantee individual freedoms.

Bid for telecom control

The government decreed a return to a state monopoly of international telecommunications at the end of January 2003. It gave privately-owned operators 30 days to switch their international communications over to TelOne, a state-owned company. Several of these private operators had set up their own satellite telecommunications network since 2000. The government's motive was above all financial, as it wanted to take back the lucrative international phone call market. But the move would also have facilitated government surveillance of the phone and Internet networks.

The Harare high court threw out the decree on 4 February, saying it was contrary to the right of competition and contrary to a 1998 supreme court decree dismantling the state's monopoly of telecommunications. The court also said TelOne did not have the technical capacity to handle all of Zimbabwe's international telephone traffic.

The banned Daily News comes back in online form

After the supreme court ruled that The Daily News was operating illegally, the police closed the newspaper down on 12 September and detained several of its executives. The aim was to silence once of the country's few independent media, one deemed to be overly critically of President Mugabe's government.

But the staff decided to carry on publishing the newspaper on a website hosted in South Africa. Gugulethu Moyo, the newspaper's lawyer, said the new technologies would make life hard for governments that try to control the news.

14 arrested for anti-Mugabe e-mail message

Fourteen people were arrested at the end of November 2003 for disseminating an e-mail message between 6 and 11 November criticising President Mugabe's economic policies and calling for his departure.

The government daily The Herald said they were released on bail of 50,000 Zimbabwean dollars (about 50 euros). It also claimed the e-mail message incited the population to stage "violent demonstrations and strikes" to force the president to step down.

Links

* The DAI (Digital Access Index) has been devised by the International Telecommunications Union to measure the access of a country's inhabitants to information and communication technology. It ranges from 0 (none at all) to 1 (complete access).

** Assessment of the situation in each country (good, middling, difficult, serious) is based on murders, imprisonment or harassment of cyber-dissidents or journalists, censorship of news sites, existence of independent news sites, existence of independent ISPs and deliberately high connection charges.

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