Covering the multiple crises in the Sahel freely is increasingly difficult for journalists, even more so since the military took power in some countries, says Reporters Without Borders in a report published on Monday (April 3). The Sahelian strip that crosses the continent from west to east threatens to become “Africa’s largest non-information zone”, specifies RSF in this grim report.
The expulsion of the correspondents of the French dailies Le Monde and Liberation by the junta in power in Burkina Faso on Saturday further obscured the picture. The RSF report was written before their expulsion.
The local and international press has been facing a “constant deterioration” of its working conditions for ten years, underlines this document covering Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, but also the north of Benin, confronted to similar security challenges.
It describes journalists caught between the violence of jihadists and armed groups on the one hand, and the restrictions, pressures, media suspensions and expulsions of foreign correspondents by the authorities on the other. He evokes the negative effect played by the arrival according to him of the Russian private security company Wagner in Mali.
“Patriotic processing” of information
“Five journalists were murdered and six others went missing between 2013 and 2023,” the report noted. It reports nearly 120 journalists arrested or detained during this period, including 72 in Chad alone. It reports on attacks by jihadists and the disappearance of community radio stations, which were widely listened to, because they did not adhere to their cause.
Vast expanses have become inaccessible to journalists because they are too dangerous. The sources are “terrified” by the possibility of reprisals from the armed groups, but also from the authorities. In Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad, barely at the helm of their countries, the military sought “to control the media through bans or restrictions, even attacks or arbitrary arrests” .
RSF recalls the suspension of the French media France 24 and Radio France Internationale in Mali and Burkina Faso. With the expulsion or the forced departure of foreign correspondents for lack of accreditation, the field is left “free to the media favorable to the pro-Russian narrative defending the presence of Wagner’s mercenaries in the region”, which contributes “to the explosion of disinformation “.
Pressuring the press in the name of “patriotic treatment” of information promotes “ordered journalism”, and self-censorship on sensitive subjects like Wagner or the losses inflicted by the jihadists. They also fuel cyberbullying against dissonant voices, reports RSF. The NGO also mentions the deterioration of the financial situation of the media, under the effect of the crisis and the end of State subsidies.
RSF suggests some glimmers of hope. She mentions the mirror copy of the RFI and France 24 sites that she created to continue to capture them. She cites the creation of different modes of collecting information and partnerships between media, as well as the development of fact-checking.
