Banned Zimbabwean paper revived with Irish help

ZIMBABWE: A banned Zimbabwean newspaper is being resurrected today, to mark World Press Freedom Day, with the help of a group…

ZIMBABWE:A banned Zimbabwean newspaper is being resurrected today, to mark World Press Freedom Day, with the help of a group of Irish human rights campaigners.

Three years after it was shut down by the Zimbabwean government, the Daily News will publish a special edition online with contributions from some of its founding journalists, who now live in exile.

Andrew Furlong, a former Anglican Dean of Clonmacnoise, who co-ordinated the project, said it sought to draw worldwide attention to the growing attacks on press freedom in Zimbabwe.

These include the brutal beating of three former Daily News journalists who were trying to cover a non-governmental prayer vigil last March.

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Writing in the Daily News in Exile, Sandra Nyaria - the newspaper's ex-political correspondent - said: "Having trained to become a journalist in a very different Zimbabwe than we have now, I could never have imagined that today I would be writing this article from a foreign country . . .

"As I write this article today, colleagues I worked with on the newspaper are nursing painful wounds inflicted on them by the police in Zimbabwe. They were wounded while doing their work exercising that right that I naively thought was God-given."

The special edition is being posted on Amnesty International's website (www.amnesty.ie) for distribution electronically to Zimbabwe and elsewhere. The initiative is the brainchild of a 40- strong Zimbabwe campaign group within Amnesty's Irish section.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists identified Zimbabwe as one of the most restrictive regimes for the media on the continent. It also listed three other states - Ethiopia, the Gambia and DR Congo - as the worst "backsliders" in Africa on press freedom this year.