Eight months after Mali, on Saturday 3 December, Burkina Faso ordered Radio France Internationale (RFI) to be “suspended immediately and until further notice”. The local authorities have accused the French media in particular of relaying a “message of intimidation” attributed to a “terrorist leader”, the Burkinabe government spokesman said.
Through this broadcast, RFI would have contributed to “a desperate maneuver by terrorist groups to deter thousands of Burkinabés mobilized in defense of the fatherland,” defends a press release signed by spokesman Jean-Emmanuel Ouédraogo.
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Earlier this week, the support group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM, affiliated with al-Qaeda) released a video in which one of its leaders in Burkina Faso threatened to attack villages defended by Volunteers for Defense of the Homeland (VDP). , civilian auxiliaries to the army, which has just recruited 90,000 in three weeks to deal with a resurgence in jihadist attacks.
Two coups in eight months
The government also criticized RFI, the French public radio, for including “false information” in its press review on Friday, suggesting that “the president of the transition, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, assures that an attempted coup on aims his power”. The press release recalls that “already on November 3, the government expressed its outrage at the tendentious attitude of the journalists of these media and their tendency to discredit the struggle in which the people of Burkina Faso are fighting for more freedom and dignity deploy”. .
Burkina Faso, the scene of two military coups in eight months and plagued by jihadist violence since 2015, became the second country in the region to ban RFI this year. On April 27th in Mali, also led by putschist soldiers, the ax fell for the same radio and France 24, two media houses of the group France Médias Monde (FMM) had been cut off since mid-March – a qualified decision as “serious” by Emmanuel Macron. The ruling junta accused them of passing on information that the Malian army was involved in attacks on civilians. FMM then dismissed allegations which, “in addition to being totally unfounded,” “refer to the radio that promoted the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda”.
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