On May 18 2005, the Zimbabwean government launched Operation Murambatsvina, rendering more that 700 000 homeless and without an opportunity to eke a living. This MAD clean-up operation, which up till now, has not been explained why it was done hit intenational headlines.
A number of journalists snuck into the country and covered this act of barbarism, not by a foreign force but a GOVERNMENT against its own people. Since then a number of journalists have won international awards. Sadly though Zimbabwean journalists have not been able to take advantage of this tragic incident to report on the stories of those affected.
Another British Journo Neil Connery of ITV won a award on his coverage of Operation Murambatsvina
(Unfortunately we were unable to get the link to the actual report.)
Reporting by Associated Press
Neil Connery, of Britain's ITV, won the television prize atthe annual Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents, which this year honored journalists who covered the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Iraq war and violence in Africa.
Connery won the television for a report on last year's government campaign of mass evictions in Zimbabwe, which the political opposition said was aimed at breaking up their support base among the urban poor.
Meanwhile as the first European memorial to journalists killed while doing their jobs was being inaugurated last Saturday, word trickled in: Three journalists had been shot to death in Afghanistan and Russia.
The killings resonated as press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders and the town of Bayeux in northwest France unveiled a memorial to some 2,000 journalists and other news media workers killed in the line of duty around the world since World War II.
"This morning we had tears in our eyes hearing the accounts of family members of those journalists" honored in Bayeux, said Robert Menard, president of Reporters Without Borders, "and then suddenly — this."
"We were expecting anything but this today ... three at once. You can imagine how people responded here," he said by telephone. "It shows how much such killings are everyday news." Fifty-six journalists have been killed this year — mainly in Iraq, Menard said.
Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist known for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya, was shot to death Saturday in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in a killing prosecutors believe could be connected to her investigative work.
"She single-handedly incarnated the resistance to the order that Mr. Putin wants to impose on the media," Menard said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Nobody can imagine this was just a crime committed by common criminals."
Also last Saturday, two German journalists for the national broadcaster Deutsche Welle were gunned down while traveling through northern Afghanistan. Their identities were not immediately released.
The memorial in Bayeux to slain journalists, said to be the first of its kind in Europe, features four white markers etched with the names of journalists, photographers, and camera and sound technicians killed since 1944 — when Allied troops liberated the town. Additional stones are to be added in coming months.
Relatives, friends or former colleagues wiped their eyes or laid bouquets on a well-sculpted lawn around the markers. Lebanese anchorwoman Giselle Khoury honored her late husband Samir Kassir, a journalist and critic of Syria's policy in Lebanon, who was killed by a car bomb last year.
Talk of the deaths was on many lips at last Saturday night's ceremony.
John Stephenson, of the New Zealand magazine Metro, won the print prize for his reporting on the Iraq war in June last year. The photography prize was given to Jaafar Astiyeh, of Agence France-Presse, for his photos of violence in the West Bank over the last two years.
Alex Last, of the British Broadcasting Corp., won the radio prize for a report from Nigeria on hostage-taking in the Niger Delta.
The contest's first place awards include a cash prize of €7,600 (US$9,620). Twenty-eight reports in the print, photo, radio and TV categories were in the running this year.
The Bayeux prizes were first awarded in 1994 to recognize journalists who excel in perilous conditions. Bayeux was one of the first towns liberated from Nazi occupation in the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II.
Edited By Zimjournalists Arise
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