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Burkina Faso: Strides after harassment

By John Liebhardt Posted Apr 1 2004

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On the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 13, 1998, the journalist Norbert Zongo and three companions stopped by a small bar in rural Burkina Faso, a West African nation. The group, which included Zongo's younger brother, an employee at Zongo's nearby ranch and a chauffer, was taking a break from their weekend hunting trip. Two beers later, they piled into a Toyota Land Cruiser and left. Witnesses would later say a blue truck without license plates sped by the bar shortly after the party left.

By the standards of Burkina Faso journalists, Zongo was the most outspoken critic of the government. He used The Independent, the weekly newspaper he founded in 1993, as a platform to decry corruption and push for human rights in Burkina Faso and throughout all of Africa.

Zongo had recently been running a series of stories investigating the mysterious – and perhaps politically motivated – murder of David Ouedraogo, the chauffer to the brother of Burkina Faso's president, Blaise Compaoré. In the months leading up to that December Sunday, Zongo demanded that prosecutors question the president's brother and the security forces about the killing. The stories brought Zongo unveiled threats against his life. He once fell ill with food poisoning, and one edition of The Independent failed to hit the newsstands. Rumors spread that Zongo had been arrested and the publication halted by the government. Zongo himself also seemed to have sensed the danger ahead. In the last edition before the hunting trip, he claimed the voice of The Independent would survive even if he was to be arrested or killed.

That prediction caught up to Zongo soon after he left the bar. Half an hour after the party drove off, a lone bicyclist stumbled upon their car, completely in flames. The fire was so intense that it charred a large tree nearby. Authorities would soon discover that the remains of the 4×4 contained the bodies of Zongo and two of his colleagues. The driver's body was found not far from the car. The four had been shot at close range before the car was lit on fire.

The killings ignited Burkina Faso. The nation ground to a halt as people from all over the country poured into the streets for three months of general strikes and at times violent protests against the government. A minor celebrity in life, in death Zongo became a symbol for injustice and all else that ailed the country. “This was a cause for the whole nation,” says Chrysogone Zougmore, secretary general of the Burkinabé Movement for Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples. “People came to fight against assassinations, to fight for democracy, to fight for good governance, to fight for a free press.”

Opposition parties, in complete disarray before Zongo's death, found they could tap into the public's new-found anger. The independent press followed the parties' lead as the continual protests lifted reporters' fears of openly questioning the government. In the days that followed, many new publications were born – often investigative weeklies patterned after Zongo's The Independent. Private radio stations began to crowd the airwaves.

Today, those changes are still being felt in Burkina Faso. The press has found that freedom of expression still remains — or the most part. Indepen-dent journalists today have great flexibility reporting the news, says Lierme Somé, who is now publisher of The Independent. “When you are a journalist for the government, your role is to say the future will be good,” he said. “We independent journalists can say that it is not that good.”

In 1999, an independent investigator named six suspects in Zongo's murder case, all members of the Presidential Security Regiment. However, only one person has been arrested.

Security is still an issue for reporters. In 2001, a young reporter was found shot and stabbed to death in his home, and prosecutors say they lacked enough evidence to charge anyone in the case. In 2002, police confiscated the computer and papers of Kristophe Koffi, correspondent for Agence France-Presse, and detained him for two days, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders reported. In August 2002, Newton Ahmed Barry, editor of the L'Événement, was accused of spying for the neighboring Ivory Coast. Liermé Somé has been detained twice in the past three years, for one day each time.

The most recent form of harassment, however, likely did not come from government sources. In October, The Independent ran a story about a local businessman illegally importing motorcycles and mopeds. One evening a few nights after the story ran, Somé received a call at his office from a friend worried about his safety. Somé then retired to the restroom, only to hear heavy boot steps climbing the stairs to The Independent's deserted second-floor offices. The heavy-booted visitor paced through the office, smoked cigarettes and rifled through desks. Afraid for his safety, Somé hid in the cramped bathroom. Finally, at two in the morning, the visitor left.

Somé claimed he was being intimidated, and government reaction was swift: Security guards were immediately dispatched to follow and protect Somé. “One could say on the whole that since the death of Norbert Zongo, there are the same certain threats,” Somé says. “But the authorities today know that if ever a journalist is killed again, it would be a disaster.”

The gradual improvement of the security situation has allowed many journalists in Burkina Faso to focus on other problems affecting the media. The first is economics, an issue that runs deep here. Researchers found that more than half of the adult population lives on less than US$150 per year, roughly 41 cents a day. That's about the same price as a daily newspaper, placing it far outside many people's budgets. Only 20 percent of all adults are literate, studies show. The literacy rate is much lower in the countryside where fewer people can read a newspaper.

Professionalism is also an issue holding back independent journalists. Since Zongo's death, they have slowly been changing their reporting styles, moving from covering meetings and official events to embarking on more investigative work. The rewards of these in-depth reports are exceptionally high, but so are the pitfalls of sloppy reporting. The lack of formal training – and sound reporting skills – can get any journalist into trouble.

The Norbert Zongo National Center of the Press, a research and media education center, attempts to fill this training gap. At the time of his death, Zongo was the president of the Private Press Publisher's Society and a founding member of the center, which took his name after he was killed.

During one of the center's many training sessions, reporters, editors and media professionals met for training. Our main job is “to make journalists aware of their role in society,” says Abdoulaye Diallo, director. “This is important. One knows that people won't apply this knowledge right away, but hopefully eventually everyone will.”

Five years after the bodies of Norbert Zongo and his companions were found shot and burned, few could have predicted the strides the Burkina Faso media have made. Burkina Faso's independent media have begun to live up to expectations.

But the whole country still feels the weight of the Norbert Zongo story, which in the past year has taken on a life of its own. Some of the men originally questioned about the killings were arrested last fall for their involvement in an alleged coup attempt against the Compaoré government. The coincidence that these two stories have collided did not go unnoticed by the independent press.

During the fifth anniversary of the killings in December, the independent press filled its pages with every aspect of the story, including the release of a new documentary on the life and death of Norbert Zongo. The state-owned press, however, was mostly silent. A program on state-run television that was to discuss Zongo was canceled before it could run. It is actions like these, some say, that force independent reporters to work even harder to get their stories heard.

“Norbert Zongo was someone who was very good, very social, and his death was very difficult for everybody,” Abdoulaye Diallo says. “But eventually you must do something with his death. You must fight to know the reality, the truth of this affair. We must all battle to know the truth.”

1993
Zongo founded The Independent to push for human rights in Burkina Faso and the rest of Africa.

December 13, 1998
Zongo and three colleagues killed outside of a bar in rural Burkina Faso.

1999
An independent investigator named six suspects in the murder case, all members of the PSR. Only one was arrested.

2001
A young journalist was found shot and stabbed to death in his home; prosecutors lacked evidence to make any charges.

2002
Other journalists in the area are accused of journalistic crimes and conspiracies with other nations.