(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed “outrage” over Zimbabwe’s jamming of short-wave broadcasts by SW Radio Africa, a privately-owned radio station based in London which employs Zimbabwean journalists living in exile. The broadcasts have been blocked since 7 March 2005. In a letter to the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN body, RSF asked the […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed “outrage” over Zimbabwe’s jamming of short-wave broadcasts by SW Radio Africa, a privately-owned radio station based in London which employs Zimbabwean journalists living in exile. The broadcasts have been blocked since 7 March 2005.
In a letter to the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN body, RSF asked the organisation “to seriously examine this situation, which constitutes a grave violation of Harare’s undertakings towards the United Nations.”
The letter urged ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi “to demand official and credible explanations from Zimbabwe, which has been a member state of the ITU since 18 February 1981, and, as such, obliged to conform to the provisions of its constitution, conventions and administrative regulations.”
RSF added, “Thanks to support from China, which exports its repressive expertise, Robert Mugabe’s government has yet again just proved itself to be one of the most active predators of press freedom. In the middle of an electoral campaign, Zimbabwe has not only flouted the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) democratic principles, it is now also displaying open contempt for its commitments to the ITU and the UN conventions it has signed.”
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ), a Harare-based independent watchdog, said the jamming of SW Radio Africa’s broadcasts is being carried out from Thornhill airbase, located outside the southwestern town of Gweru, between Harare and Bulawayo, where the government has a transmission station.
According to the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), a United States federal government body, the equipment being used for the jamming comes from China, which has close trade links with Zimbabwe, particularly in the area of telecommunications.
BBC Monitoring, a BBC offshoot that monitors news media throughout the world, said it established on 16 March that SW Radio Africa’s three daily broadcasts were being “deliberately jammed.” The 16h00 GMT broadcast on 11.845 kHz was drowned by a 1 kHz signal. The 17h00 and 18h00 GMT broadcasts were jammed by a “rotary” type interference.
ITU regulations define interference as, “The effect of unwanted energy due to one or a combination of emissions, radiations, or inductions upon reception in a radiocommunication system, manifested by any performance degradation, misinterpretation, or loss of information which could be extracted in the absence of such unwanted energy.”
Article 1003 of the annex of the ITU Constitution defines a “harmful interference” as one that “obstructs or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service.”
