Three French broadcasters have been banned in Burkina Faso.
ATTILA KISBENEDEK
- Three French broadcasters have been banned in Burkina Faso within eight months.
- Media repression coincides with the growing influence of jihadist movements in Burkina Faso.
- Media activists highlighted the killing, assaults, kidnappings, torture, and harassment of journalists in Cameroon by state security and non-state actors.
Burkina Faso has banned a third media organisation within eight months, at a time when there’s also severe censorship of journalists in the face of the growing influence of jihadist movements.
The latest television station to be banned by the Superior Council for Communication, a government media regulator, is the French news channel La Chaîne Info (LCI).
The station will be offline for three months for “allegedly airing false information about deteriorating security conditions in the country on its current affairs show, 24H Pujadas”, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a statement.
Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa programme coordinator, said the banning of the station was not grounded in fact and deprived Burkinabè civilians of keeping abreast with current affairs.
She said:
The latest suspension of a French media outlet over its insurgency reporting appears retaliatory rather than grounded in fact and robs the people of Burkina Faso of their right to know what is happening in their country.
Other stations frozen out are RFI in December last year and France 24 in March this year.
There has been an insurgency directed by terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for eight years.
This has resulted in thousands of deaths and millions of displaced inhabitants from Burkina Faso.
Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the head of an artillery unit of the armed forces, took power within months of another coup.
But as a coup leader, isolated by the African Union (AU) and with frosty relations with former colonisers, France, he instructed French troops that had been fighting insurgents to leave the country in preference of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group.
Meanwhile, in Cameroon, Monday marked six months since the abduction of prominent Cameroonian journalist Martinez Zogo, whose mutilated body was found five days later.
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Freedom House, the CPJ, and the American Bar Association’s Centre for Human Rights collaborated on a report on press freedom for the United Nations that highlighted the killing, assaults, kidnappings, torture, and harassment of journalists in Cameroon by police, military, intelligence agencies, and non-state actors.
“The politically-motivated detention of journalists in Cameroon is of serious concern,” said Margaux Ewen, director of Freedom House’s Political Prisoners Initiative.
She added: “Through this submission, we remind Cameroon of its obligations under domestic and international law. We also show solidarity with the five journalists currently behind bars, who will not be forgotten.”
Cameroon is rated “not free” in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2023 report.
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