A reporter for the *Mail Africa Bureau* in Windhoek, Tony Weaver, whose articles on the war have on occasions exposed atrocities committed by Koevoet, was refused accreditation to fly to Oshakati and witness the release of the Kassinga detainees. The media liaison officer of the SWA Territory Force said that on orders from Pretoria, Weaver was being barred from the flight, which carried a large group of journalists to Oshakati. He confirmed that the Africa Bureau would henceforth be given no access to military facilities, press conferences or trips to the war zones. Only written press releases would be given to the Africa Bureau.
In a further statement, the SADF said that Weaver had applied for accreditation as a military correspondent in early 1983 and had been found unacceptable. The rejection concerned Weaver personally and not the organisation he represented.
Weaver, whose articles have appeared in several South African newspapers, including the *Rand Daily Mail* and *Cape Times*, was assaulted by an alleged member of Koevoet in April 1984 while investigating a bomb blast in Oshakati. At the time he believed the attack was connected with articles he had written alleging torture by Koevoet and other branches of the police and army. Weaver said he had been warned in the past by police contacts and by sources in the war zones that he had been 'marked by Koevoet'.
Pressure has also been exerted on the churches to refrain from criticism of South African activities in Namibia. An issue of *Dateline: Namibia* (No.5 of 1983), a newsletter published by Lutheran church bodies in the United States, was banned by the South African government in November 1984. It contained extracts of a speech by the general secretary of the Council of Churches in Namibia dealing with repression and violation of human rights in Namibia. The president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, Archbishop Hurley, was charged in October 1984 with falsely accusing Koevoet of committing atrocities against civilians in Namibia. The charge arose out of comments he made at a press conference in February 1983. At a court hearing on 19 October 1984, the case was postponed until 18 February 1985.
Several South African newspapers were threatened with prosecution under the Police Act for publishing Hurley's statement. In October, the South African authorities decided not to press charges against the newspapers. The *Pretoria News* however was found by the South African Media Council to have breached a clause of the Code of Conduct which requires comments to be based on truly stated facts. The hearing arose out of a police complaint against the newspaper. By majority vote, the Media Council found that comments by the newspaper that Koevoet had become discredited, that urgent action was needed to make it accountable or that it should be disbanded had been 'founded on facts which may or may not have been true'. The newspaper was required to publish the adjudication on its leader page.
Such pressures by the authorities, particularly from military and police quarters, are clearly designed to intimidate the media and ensure that extreme caution is exercised by editors when publishing articles on the war. Increasingly, newspapers have tended to base their articles entirely on information released by the military itself.
The suppression of news about the war, and about atrocities committed by the armed forces, is ensured through the use of repressive legislation such as the South African Defence Act and the Police Act against individuals or organisations prepared to publicise such news, through selective presentation of information at official army briefings of journalists and increasingly through self-censorship by the press and media for fear of invoking prosecution or banning of their publications.
The case of the *Windhoek Observer*, for many years an outspoken critic of South African policies in Namibia, showed how the use of a banning order and subsequent legislative, economic and political pressures induced the newspaper to adopt a more conciliatory editorial line, in particular by removing Gwen Lister from the post of political editor.
The permanent ban on the newspaper was lifted with a warning from the Publications Appeal Board to the paper to 'steer a course clear of the tone of the undesirable aspects in the May 26 issue' (one of the banned editions). Subsequent editions of the newspaper have mostly avoided critical comment on South Africa's occupation or reference to the war. In its edition of 29 September, the paper stressed that 'we have taken cognisance of the wishes of the Appeal Board, and we most certainly will be found to be in compliance with those wishes'. When the editor subsequently came into possession of a classified document containing minutes of a secret meeting of counter-intelligence officers in Windhoek, he stressed that he had no intention of disseminating the contents, but had handed the document over to the 'right authority'. The contents of the document had been described in detail in the *London Observer*.
