Niger government suspends RFI

CSC president Daouda Diallo announced on 12 March that all of RFI's FM broadcast permits were suspended for three months for two reasons. One was "discrediting the institutions of the republic during broadcasts on 10 March dedicated to Moussa Kaka's arrest" and the other was "systematically excluding calls from Niamey during the broadcast".

The CSC did not elaborate on the second reason, but Agence France-Presse said the ministers of foreign affairs and communications had tried in vain to express their views during the discussions about Kaka's arrest that were broadcast by RFI.

"Instead of dealing with the problem, the government has again targeted the messenger who refers to it," Reporters Without Borders said. "It responds to attempts at persuasion with inflexibility, and to international campaigns with repression. Its rigidity in the face of the need to release Kaka is leading nowhere. Depriving the public of RFI does not solve the problem. The government needs to understand that it is going down the wrong road and is just making things worse."

RFI was last suspended in Niger on 19 July 2007, when the CSC stopped its FM broadcasts for a month for "biased and partisan coverage" of a rebellion in the north of the country by the Tuaregs of the Niger People's Movement for Justice (MNJ).

The move was seen at the time as a warning to Kaka, the Niger correspondent of both RFI and Reporters Without Borders. He was arrested two months later, on 20 September 2007, on a charge of "complicity in an attack on state authority".

Article published courtesy of RSF