Two Bombs Later, Still Publishing   

It was an early Sunday morning in late January when Sam Munyani woke from his bed and was jarred by a blast that sounded like a powerful crash of thunder. Munyani, a reporter at Zimbabwe's only privately owned daily newspaper, arrived at his office that day and was shocked to find that the noise had not been thunder, but a bomb which detonated in his paper's printing factory. No one was hurt, but the $2 million press, which cranked out 100,000 papers a day, had been reduced to a jumbled mess of loose wire and warped metal.

"The place was such a--it was a terrible sight," Munyani says. "You start thinking, 'We're not going to have a paper. The paper is gone.' "

But, in fact, the Daily News hit the streets the next day. It found an outside printer and published with a front-page apology explaining that the staff could only publish 16 pages, half of the normal run, because of the incident.

The paper, based in Harare, was launched three years ago and is owned by a consortium of Zimbabwean investors. The bombing is just one example of the mounting pressure facing the privately owned press. Zimbabwe's ruling party saw the rise of its first viable opposition two years ago, and then watched the new party gain a voice in the young Daily News. A showdown between the privately owned press and the ruling party escalated.

Reporters at the Daily complain of assaults, abductions, threats and police harassment. Even being a newspaper vendor can be a dangerous profession in

Zimbabwe, where independent journalists are branded purveyors of imperialism, foreign influence and civil war.

"I've learned to expect anything in this operation," says Geoff Nyarota, the Daily's editor in chief, explaining that another bomb exploded last year in an art gallery just below his office. "I'm not saying that one, therefore, gets used to it, but we always expect the worst in this place."

This time, the bombing was preceded by several days of reports of attacks, demonstrations and newspaper burnings. A Daily editor was assaulted by war veterans of the country's liberation struggle. The veterans threw copies of the Daily into a bonfire and declared the paper "banned" after it quoted Zimbabweans celebrating the death of Congo leader Laurent Kabila, a longtime ally of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Copies of the government-owned Herald were also burned, and that paper's delivery driver was assaulted by a group of youths, according to the Daily. Then, the Daily was bombed.

Reporters striving to be objective face challenges in this environment. The key, they say, is to keep reporting the facts. "The motto of the Daily News is 'telling it like it is.'... You just record the events as they happen to the best of your assessment," Nyarota says.

But Julius Zava, a deputy news editor at the Daily, says the paper wasn't objective enough. "We made insinuations, pointing fingers. That shouldn't have happened. It's a story where you just say 'police are still investigating,' " he says. "I don't think it's possible for someone to write about themselves objectively."

The paper carried a story that quoted a journalists' union blaming the attack on the government and the veterans. It also reported that "some members of the public and organizations" have implicated the veterans. A Daily editorial suggested the government played a role in the bombing, and letters to the editor also blamed the government and commended the paper for upholding free speech.

"A completely different set of people with different motives could have bombed the press," Zava says.

The violence compounds an already bad situation in the country, where reporters face a host of laws that inhibit access to information. Under one law, reporters can be charged with publishing material that causes "alarm and despondency." The charge, which carries up to seven years in prison, was lodged against Zimbabwean journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto, who were tortured two years ago after running a story on a failed military coup (see "A Ticket to Hell," September 1999).

"This has become the normal condition of Zimbabwe journalism," says Richard Carver, a consultant for the Media Monitoring Project, a watchdog group for African media. "It's an appalling environment."

Reporters at the Daily will not easily forget the scene of that frightful morning: the destroyed machinery, the shattered windows, the ripped-open roof, the burnt rolls of newsprint and the putrid smell.

The Daily, with an editorial staff of about 28, is now producing about 20,000 fewer papers each day, at three-fourths their normal size. Nyarota is trying to raise funds for a new press but does not expect one to be installed before October. Reporters say there is little they can do to avert danger.

"You do get scared, but we don't go looking over our shoulders," Munyani says. "If they want to do you in, they can easily do that."