Stifling Dissent in Uganda
Zimbabwe is not the only African country in which journalists are under siege. Any place where the politics are constriced by authoritarianism or merely by the encroachments of paranoid leadership the members of the media run the risk of being jailed. Just the latest example comes from Uganda, where three journalists (including the editor) from the magazine The Independent have been arrested (and the magazine’s offices raided) for possessing seditious materials and for writing inflammatory articles. It is a truism that a free society needs a free media, which means the opposite is also true — unfree countries, or countries on the way to unfreedom, crush the free press.