The Council of the Southern African Editors' Forum (SAEF) held a weekend meeting in the Namibian capital Windhoek and 24 editors from eight countries backed the resolution mooted by chairman Henry Jeffreys from South Africa's influential Beeld daily.
"The SAEF calls on the Zimbabwe government to reinstate the rule of law and allow for freedom of expression and freedom of the media", the editors said.
"We also call upon other ... countries to bring pressure ... on the Zimbabwe government to reopen the offices of the newspapers that have forced to close, to remove the threats against other media, to allow journalists to practice their craft without fear and to allow state owned media to serve the Zimbabwean people as a whole and not favoured parties", the statement said.
Zimbabwe's private independent Daily News, which was highly critical of President Robert Mugabe's government, was forcibly closed on September 12 last year on charges that it was being published illegally.
The Daily News is the only independent alternative to Zimbabwe's two state-run dailies, The Herald and The Chronicle, and has around one-million readers. - Sapa-AFP
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