Party youths attack paper

Malawi's independent press is the latest casualty of political intolerance in the region, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) said in a statement.

Youths allegedly affiliated to the ruling party abducted a reporter and assaulted the editor-in-chief and several other staffers of a privately owned Lilongwe newspaper, The Chronicle, the media watchdog said on Friday.

Some of the assaults allegedly took place outside a police station.

"Youths belonging to the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) Young Democrats and the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), an official intelligence body ...(on) 22 February, literally broke into" the paper's offices.

They abducted a reporter and fled with him in an unmarked Land Rover, MISA said. Publisher and editor-in-chief, Robert Jamieson, told MISA he and his son gave chase in his car. "We managed to contact the para-military police, the Police Mobile Force, who helped us to force the Land Rover into a police station," Jamieson was quoted as saying.

MISA alleged the police looked on as "the party thugs assaulted Jamieson, his son who also works at the paper, and the reporter, Mallick Mnela. They accused them of writing ill of President [Bakili] Muluzi and the UDF".

The Chronicle said of the incident. "Politically related violence has been given as one reason [why] Denmark has withdrawn all aid to Malawi and [why] Britain and the United States have withheld funding for budgetary support."

The paper said it was not the first time that police had "stood helplessly by as UDF cadres openly attack people seen to be out of step with government".

"Although this is not the first time that the Young Democrats [the UDF's militia] have targeted individual journalists in the country it is the first incidence of them visiting a newsroom to terrorise staff and threaten dire consequences (for) writing critically on government's performance."

The paper warned that "political analysts have indicated that this behaviour by Young Democrats could see the death of critical and accurate reporting in the country and a return to repression and autocracy".