Telegragh
Webster Shamu, Zimbabwe’s minister of media, information and publicity, said the BBC and his government had now “acknowledged the need to put behind us the mutually ruinous relationship of the past”.
In a letter to the BBC, he said: “We agreed that whatever communication problems which the BBC and the officials of the Zimbabwe [government] may have had in the past, the Zimbabwe government never banned the BBC from carrying out lawful activities inside Zimbabwe.
“For the purposes of the record, I restate the main points of our meeting. We acknowledged the need to put behind us the mutually ruinous relationship of the past.”
The letter added that the BBC had agreed to employ local people at a bureau in Harare, adding that the corporation was free to send crews around Zimbabwe.
BBC reporters have been banned from Zimbabwe since 2001, although corporation journalists, including John Simpson, the world affairs editor, had managed to evade the ban by reporting undercover within the country. More…