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Zimbabweans use blogs, text messages for info

21 Jul 2008

Posted on the "This is Zimbabwe" blog, they show charred, lacerated limbs and blank eyes staring out from the face of the official, Gift Mutsvungunu, frozen in a death grimace. A note accompanying the pictures says the picture quality is bad because the photographer was shaking with fear.

The photographs of the tortured body of an opposition official are blurry but chilling.

Increasingly, Zimbabweans are going online and using cell phone text messages to share stories of life and death in a country where independent traditional media have been all but silenced, and from which reporters from most international media have been barred.

"Any organisation or NGO working in the area of promotion of free expression is at risk," Bev Clark, one of the founders of the Kubatana blogging forum, said via email. "Zimbabwe is encased in fear."

Harare-based Kubatana is a network of nonprofit organisations that runs a blogging forum. The forum relies on 13 bloggers in Zimbabwe, who email submissions to an administrator who posts them to the site. The network also reaches beyond the web by sending text messages to 3,800 subscribers.

Read the full article here.