Harare - A private Zimbabwean newspaper said on Thursday it had received a bullet and a threat from an unidentified source over stories relating to the national army, and warned this could be part of a new crackdown on the media.
President Robert Mugabe's government has piled pressure on the media in the last five years with a set of tough media laws imposed in the face of the country's deepening political and economic crisis.
Iden Wetherell, projects editor of the Independent Media Group, said a large envelope containing a live bullet and two newspaper cuttings were delivered to the group's Sunday Standard newspaper on Wednesday, addressed to the editor.
One of the cuttings was a recent cartoon in the Standard in which baboons were shown laughing at the wages of soldiers in Zimbabwe, where inflation has rocketed past 1 000%.
The other was an old editorial from the same paper entitled "The sham of state paranoia," which accused the government, the army and the secret Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) of human rights abuses, said Wetherell.
Critical stance
"The cuttings were accompanied by a handwritten note, written: 'Dear editor, What is this editor? Watch your step!'," he said.
"We don't know who could be behind this, but we take this threat very seriously indeed, coming as it does in the context of an overall crackdown on the media and on the overall civil society," he said.
Wetherell said the threat had been reported to the police and followed a piece by a columnist in a government-controlled daily mocking the weekly's acting editor Bill Saidi and suggesting the newspaper could get "hurt".
Police were not immediately available to comment on the statement by the Standard, whose publisher last week won a court order to retain his Zimbabwean citizenship after the government attempted to remove it.
Johannesburg-based Trevor Ncube, who publishes the Standard and Zimbabwe Independent as well as South Africa's Mail & Guardian, says he has been targeted by the government for his paper's critical stance.
'Private media spearheading Western propaganda'
"We are seeing a pattern of threats against this newspaper and its proprietor," said Wetherell on Thursday.
Mugabe says private media have spearheaded a Western propaganda campaign against his government over its seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks and elections the opposition say have been rigged.
In 1999, the then-editor of the Standard newspaper, Mark Chavunduka, and his chief reporter Ray Choto were seized by army officials and later charged that they were tortured over a story suggesting there had been an attempted coup against Mugabe.
In 2000 and 2001, the offices and the printing press of Zimbabwe's largest private newspaper, The Daily News, which was later banned for failing to register with the state Media and Information Commission, were bombed by unidentified people.
"Certainly we are alert to the danger given the history of the media in this country since 1999, physical abductions and torture which, if they have been investigated, have not been concluded to our satisfaction," he said.
