2023-06-29 18:36:14
The Burkina Faso media regulatory authority decided to suspend the French news channel LCI for three months on Thursday, following a journalist’s remarks on the situation linked to jihadist violence qualified as “false information”.
LCI’s programs “are suspended for a period of three months in Burkina Faso on the bouquets of any distributor of toll audiovisual services from the notification of this decision”, indicates the Superior Council of Communication (CSC), in a statement released Thursday.
According to the CSC, LCI, the private continuous news channel of the TF1 group, “broadcast on April 25, 2023, a program entitled +24h Pujadas, the info in question+, during which its journalist, Abnousse Shalmani, delivered a certain amount of information on the security crisis in the Sahel in general but also on Burkina Faso”.
The CSC criticizes the journalist in particular for having affirmed that the “+jihadists+ are advancing at full speed in the absence of any State in the conquered localities”, for having specified, “without mentioning a source, that 40% of the territory is occupied by + jihadists +” or that “nearly 90,000 civilians called Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP) are used + like cannon fodder + to protect the Burkinabè soldiers once morest terrorists”.
The regulatory authority considers that these remarks are “simple speculations and malicious insinuations”, some “likely to create unrest within the populations and to weaken the necessary collaboration sought between the army and the civilians for the safeguard of the fatherland burkinabè”.
Several French media targeted
At the beginning of April, the Burkina Faso authorities had expelled the correspondents of the French daily newspapers Liberation and Le Monde. Liberation had just published an investigation into the alleged executions of young people in a barracks.
The cut signal of the France 24 channel on a television screen, on March 27, 2023 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
AFP/Archives
At the end of March, they had ordered the indefinite suspension of the television channel France 24, following having suspended in December 2022 Radio France Internationale (RFI), French public media, accused of having relayed messages from jihadist leaders.
The government had however assured to remain “fundamentally attached” to freedom of expression and opinion.
Burkina has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of jihadist violence that appeared in Mali and Niger a few years earlier and which has spread beyond their borders.
On Monday, at least 31 soldiers and three army auxiliaries were killed in an attack by suspected jihadists in the north of the country, the most regularly affected area.
In mid-June, a dozen civilians were killed in an attack in the west.
The violence has left more than 10,000 dead, civilians and soldiers, for eight years, according to NGOs, and more than two million internally displaced people.
Came to power in a coup in September, the second in eight months, the military led by Captain Ibrahim Traoré should theoretically return power to civilians in July 2024.
“We can’t have elections without security,” declared Prime Minister Apollinaire Joachimson Kyélem de Tambèla at the end of May.
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