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In recent days the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), the government agency that regulates media activity in Burkina Faso, a West African country, blocked access in the country to the sites of nine foreign newspapers, including The world, Guardian e BBC Africa, after they had published a report by an NGO denouncing the violence and crimes of the military junta in power. In the past the government had already blocked foreign media several times, always to prevent the circulation of articles critical of it.
Burkina Faso is governed by a military junta that took office in 2022 in a coup, the second in a matter of months. The blocked media had recently published various articles about a relationship of the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) according to which, last February, the army killed 223 civilians, including at least 56 children, in the two villages of Nondin and Soroe.
The Minister of Communications, Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo, accused HRW of spreading false information based on what he called «a boundless imagination». Last Saturday the government therefore temporarily suspended the radio stations of BBC Africa e Voice of America, and on Monday the blocking of seven other sites was announced, again motivated by reference to the publication of the HRW report. The junta spoke of a “media campaign orchestrated around these accusations”, which it said “fully reveals the intention to discredit our armed forces”.
The sites to which access has been blocked are The world, Guardian, TV5Monde, Deutsche Welle, Ouest-France, Apanews e Ecofin Agency. The junta gave no indication of the duration of the blockade, which is active “until further notice”. From TV5Monde Furthermore, the broadcast of television programs was suspended for at least two weeks. The organization Reporters Without Borderswhich deals with freedom of expression, defined the blockades decided by the military junta of Burkina Faso as “serious and insulting decisions”.
The Human Rights Watch report was published last April 25 and referred to events that allegedly occurred last February 25, defined by the organization as “among the most serious abuses committed by the Burkina Faso army since 2015”. According to what the report documented, the civilians massacred by the army were accused of having collaborated with some armed jihadist groups, and the violence carried out could constitute crimes against humanity. Soldiers reportedly killed 44 people, including 20 children, in Nondin, and another 179 people, including 36 children, in Soroe.
Burkina Faso has long had a big problem with jihadist groups, who control various parts of the country and in recent years have carried out many attacks causing the death of thousands of civilians. In this context, according to HRW the massacres in Nondin and Soroe would be added to others carried out in what the army presents as counter-terrorism operations. In the two days preceding the massacres, some jihadist groups had carried out several attacks against military targets in various locations across the country. Some inhabitants of the two villages, spoken to by HRW, said they believed the massacres of civilians were an act of retaliation against the jihadist militiamen who had attacked junta targets.
It is not the first time that the military junta in power in Burkina Faso has tried to limit the circulation of information critical of it. In September 2023 had been blocked Young Africa, a French media outlet that offers both a paper newspaper and a website, after it had published various articles in which it gave an account of some problems within the army and the growing discontent of citizens. It had also been blocked in the past for similar reasons France 24. Furthermore, in November 2023 the authorities had tried to enlist dozens of journalists, activists and opposition leaders in the army, as part of a “special mobilization” which according to various human rights organizations would also have been exploited to silence dissent.
Burkina Faso was a French colony until 1960: in the following decades it had fairly close relations with France, which however worsened significantly after two coups d’état in 2022. The French media were also among the most affected by the junta for this reason , led by captain Ibrahim Traoré, who is 36 years old. Traoré took power in September 2022, in a coup eight months after another coup that overthrew democratically elected President Roch Marc Kabore.