/ 6 July 2005

DRC soldiers arrest radio station manager

Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have arrested the manager of a local radio station in the central Kasai Oriental province, the head of a private radio association said on Wednesday.

”Fortunat Kasongo, manager of the ‘Mon sillon de Boya’ [literally, ‘My furrow from Boya’] station in Boya was arrested by a dozen soldiers on Tuesday afternoon and neither his family nor the radio have heard anything since,” Freddy Mulongo said.

Mulongo, who is president of the Association of Community and Local Radios (Arco) with a membership of 136 stations across the vast country, said: ”We don’t know the reasons for this arrest.”

He added, however, that there was ”an extremely tense climate in the [two] Kasai provinces, where the heads of community radios have for several weeks been harassed by the forces of law and order”.

The vast DRC is emerging from a war that devastated the country between 1998 and 2003 and undergoing a complex political transition supervised by thousands of UN peacekeepers, which had been due to lead to democratic elections by the end of June, but the process has been extended for at least six months.

Mulongo gave no indication as to what may be troubling authorities at Kasongo’s station, near the provincial capital Mbuji-Mayi, but said the National Intelligence Agency (ANR) had also on Tuesday called in the heads of five community stations in Kasai Occidental and told them to hand over their ”documents and statutes”.

Military and administrative authorities in Kasai were unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

”This is very perverse, since some radio stations don’t have the all the official documents required and they [the authorities] know this, since we have for some years been waging a trade union struggle to have bring an end to the obligation to pay a broadcast authorisation fee with a receipt from the ANR for $5 000 (4 200 euros)”.

This is a huge sum of money in one of Africa’s many deeply impoverished countries, ravaged by years of political turmoil, infrastructure collapse and in which the last war brought in the armies of half a dozen other countries in part because the DRC has enormous potential mineral wealth.

”The authorities use the same criteria for us as they do commercial radio networks, but for the most part our journalists are volunteers, run stations in rural areas and don’t have the means to pay that kind of sum.”

Arco is in negotiations with the ministry of information about the transmission fee.

Mulongo said journalists had also been ”harassed” after covering recent demonstrations called by the political opposition when the transition programme was prolonged, though all parties were signatories to a peace accord signed in South Africa in 2002 which allowed for two six-month delays.

One such rally in Tshikapa was severely repressed and three people were killed.

The main opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party on Tuesday lodged a formal request with the United Nations for an investigation into the violence of June 30 which left 10 dead across the country and 30 according to opposition sources.

The UDPS, led by veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi, also called in the document addressed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for the ”demilitarisation of the city of Kinshasa and the withdrawal of foreign troops”.

These include Angolans and Zimbabweans, who backed Kinshasa during the war, according to the party.

On June 28, Arco denounced a ”public fatwa” from Kasai Occidental governor Andre Lubaya, who had arrested the director of a Tshikapa radio station for allowing opposition activists on the airwaves.

”Mon sillon de Boya” was shut down at the end of May for three days by a local tribal chief displeased with its broadcasts about the electoral process. – Sapa-AFP