A consignment of 60,000 copies of a London-based independent weekly newspaper distributed in Zimbabwe has been seized by customs, its editor said Monday, according to dpa. Wilf Mbanga, editor of The Zimbabwean, said customs officials had refused to release the consignment, which arrived last Thursday, despite the payment of a new 40 per cent import duty. "They told our local distributor that the order had come from ZANU(PF) (President Robert Mugabe's party) that the newspaper was not to be released," Mbanga said. The Zimbabwean is regarded as the only inexpensive locally available source of news that provides an alternative to the ZANU(PF) controlled state propaganda media. The newspaper is highly critical of President Robert Mugabe's government and one of its journalists based in Zimbabwe, Gift Phiri, was arrested and tortured last year. State media have completely excluded the Movement for Democratic Change from election coverage, refusing to take advertisements and mentioning it and its officials only to denounce them. Mbanga said since Thursday, copies of The Economist, the London- based international weekly finance magazine, had been seized "because of a cartoon" deemed offensive by authorities. Confirmation was not immediately available. On May 26, a truck carrying 60,000 copies of The Zimbabwean's sister paper, The Zimbabwean on Sunday, was hijacked by unknown gunmen who set fire to the vehicle, destroying it and the newspapers. Mbanga said copies of The Zimbabwean on Sunday had "managed to slip through" and had been distributed. All but three locally-based newspapers have managed to survive in the fierce climate of media repression and censorship in the last eight years. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says Zimbabwe is one of the world's most hostile regimes against press freedom.
