[New-imc] Proposed new IMC!

[rcp9 at cornell.edu]

A proposed new IMC is being requested.
Details are as follows:

Proposed IMC Name:	Zimbabwe
Contact Name:		Raj Patel
Email:			rcp9 at cornell.edu
Phone:			+44 7956 314026
City:			Temporary: London
State:			
Country:		
Tech Contact Name:	
Tech Contact Email:	rcp9 at cornell.edu
Tech Contact Phone:	
Regional Focus:		yes
Issue Focus:		%issue%
Event Focus:		%event%
Critical Dates:		March 2002 elections
Supporting Groups:	
Other comments:		
Resources to contribute: Information!

Why we want to be an IMC: Times are hard for the media in Zimbabwe. Even the government sponsored press, bless them, are having their knuckles rapped for the slightest deviation from the party line. Last week, Robert Mugabe banned all independent media in Zimbabwe. With elections coming up in January, the time for alternative media has never been greater. Editors of the leading newspapers have been gagged, and radical groups have little way of getting information about struggles in rural areas to the outside world.

The proposed Zimbabwe indymedia centre would not, however, be a one-shot deal, based around the March elections. There is a welter of truth and knowledge that needs to be aired in Zimbabwe. While those in the development industry have their own channels and access to the media, many do not. Internet cafes are in most towns, and there seems to be a fair bit of interest in something like this. I have talked to activists in ‘development’ as well as radical fellow travellers in socialist, anarchist and other organisations in Harare. I plan to go there later next month to organise further. 

We have some problems, though. We cannot host a site in Zimbabwe – the government will come in and smash us, and the computers, up. Open meetings are going to be difficult too – the secret police already monitor many of us, and placing an advertisement in a paper to publicise the meeting will scare away precisely the people we’d like to have write for the site. One option, and perhaps a better one, would be to organise online. It’d be helpful to get some sort of list going to do this. Again, for the reasons mentioned above, a Zimbabwe-based list isn’t viable. And although it is certain that the police will infiltrate any other list, meetings on the net put individual writers in less personal jeopardy. 

We’d like to get something up and running soonish, though. The elections draw ever closer, and it’s going to be increasingly hard to find out what the hell is going on in Zimbabwe from any source – foreign journalists have been deported, and the arrests of independent local journalists cannot be far off. The possibility of anonymous and widespread posting is one way of militating against this.