RSF urges La Francophonie to act against press freedom violators

The international media watchdog Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) has called on the community of French-speaking nations, La Francophonie, to take action against countries that violate press freedom, including 13 in Sub-saharan Africa. The call came in a communique issued on the eve of the Ninth Francophone Summit, to be held in Beirut, Lebanon, on 18 to 20 October. The organisation, RSF said, should suspend four countries, including Equatorial Guinea by virtue of a declaration approved by member states in November 2000 in Bamako, Mali, which prescribes such action in cases of "severe human rights violations". Multilateral cooperation between French-speaking countries should no longer be conducted with seven countries, according to the watchdog. Six are in Sub-saharan Africa: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Mauritania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Togo. Warnings should be given, RSF added, to nine others, including Cameroon, Comoros Islands, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Seychelles. Violations perpetrated against journalists, RSF said, included the October 2001 murder in Burkina Faso of journalism student Michel Congo, who also worked for a local publication. RSF noted that the Burkinabe press and various human rights organisations had called for the creation of an independent commission to investigate his death. It also recalled that the murder in December 1998 of independent Burkinabe journalist Norbert Zongo had still not been clarified. The watchdog said three-quarters of the 264 arrests to which journalists were subjected over the past three years had occurred in Sub-saharan Africa. These include 20 in Cameroon and 11 arrested in Guinea since 1999 for denouncing corruption among officials. In Mauritania, a dozen independent newspapers have been seized in the past three years for covering taboo issues such as slavery, corruption, human rights, drugs and Islamic networks. Carrying articles critical of ministers or the head of state has led to the seizure and destruction of opposition newspapers in Togo, and independent media are regularly censured by Guinea-Bissau's authorities, RSF added. In Niger, newspaper publisher Abdoulaye Tiémogo has been in jail since 18 June. He is serving a nine-month sentence for libel in connection with three articles that prompted Prime Minister Hama Amadou to file a lawsuit againt him. The international watchdog also mentioned Equatorial Guinea where, it said, the media were mostly controlled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and his party. "The few surviving independent newspapers have a very confidential readership but the regime nevertheless considers them dangerous," RSF said. It said its correspondent, Pedro Nolasco Ndong, who also heads the Equatorial Guinea Press Association, was intercepted at the airport in May 2001 on his return home from a seminar and taken in for questioning. Since then, he had been harassed, which caused him to seek refuge in Spain.