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HARARE - As Zimbabwe's government tries to block out independent media ahead of the March presidential election, a new shortwave radio station has managed to by-pass the regime and take to the airwaves.

Barred by restrictive legislation from broadcasting within Zimbabwe, SW Radio Africa has set up in Britain, but is run by Zimbabwean expatriates and people who moved from here to work on the sttion.

Since mid-December the station has aired three hours a day of music, news and a phone-in program -- where listeners dial a local number in Zimbabwe and receive a call back to talk on the show.

Callers have flooded the line, talking about food shortages in Zimbabwe, the widespread political violence here, and the trouble finding jobs during the nation's worst-ever economic crisis.

One other station, Voice of the People, had already turned to the shortwave solution before the June 2000 parliamentary elections.

Its programs are pre-recorded in Zimbabwe, and then transmitted from outside the country.

There's no effective way of measuring the number of listeners in Zimbabwe, but 300,000 people have visited SW Radio Africa's website, which offers a simulcast and archives of the broadcasts, the station's spokeswoman Gerry Jackson told AFP by telephone.

The last time Jackson helped start a radio station, in October 2000, Zimbabwe's government sent armed police to shut it down and seize its equipment in Harare after less than one week on the air.

The police action, which sealed off half a floor in Harare's Crowne Plaza hotel, came despite a landmark Supreme Court case that briefly ended the government monopoly on the airwaves and allowed Capital Radio to broadcast.

Government's response to her latest venture has not been kind.

"They want to will-nilly continue to beam their illegal broadcasts in the vain hope of rendering Zimbabwe ungovernable by promoting political violence, tribal division and ethnic hatred," information minister Jonathan Moyo said in the state-run Herald newspaper.

"They have all the trappings of the genocide broadcasts in Rwanda, and we don't want to have to act after the fact," he said.

President Robert Mugabe even succeeded in convincing neighboring leaders to criticize the broadcasts.

He left a summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) this month with a communique that expressed "concern" that broadcasters overseas were airing "hostile and inciting propaganda against the government".

The state press has also raised a storm claiming that the station is a tool of the British government, and over the fact that it receives funding from a branch of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)

"How did it get to this? This is supposed to be about rock and roll," Jackson said of the controversy.

"The focus of the story is the situation in Zimbabwe," she said.

"Our concern is the increase in violence in the country, and the fact that there is no freedom of speech and no freedom on assembly."

"If you were trying to keep Mugabe happy all the time, you'd be very limited in what you can do," she said.

Mugabe passed a new broadcasting law in 2000 that effectively barred Capital Radio from transmitting and placed enormous obstacles to other would-be broadcasters.

Two weeks ago, his government forced through a new security law that criminalizes criticism of the president and effectively bars political assemblies.

This week, Mugabe's government will again try to pass a new press law that will ban foreigners from working permanently in Zimbabwe and make all journalists answerable to a commission hand-picked by Moyo. Nampa-Sapa-AFP

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