Niger police acknowledged on Wednesday that officers had toured the capital, Niamey, this week to remove all copies of the independent weekly Testimony (Le Temoin) ahead of the inauguration of re-elected President Mamadou Tandja.
Tandja was inaugurated on Tuesday in the presence of six regional heads of state and about 20 000 civilians after his second-round victory on December 4.
The weekly was to have appeared on Tuesday to coincide with the ceremony, but police rounded up more than 1 000 copies, the print plates and the layout design late on Monday night to guard against any ”bad press” for the north-west African state, a senior police official said on condition of anonymity.
Publisher Ibrahim Soumana Gaoh said the shutting down of his press had nothing to do with Tandja’s inauguration but was because the issue contained ”interviews and photos” of four hostages — three military police and a soldier — kidnapped by a group of former Tuareg rebels in the desert nation’s north.
”There was nothing serious or incriminating in the articles, just general information from the four hostages confirming they were alive, that they were eating and sleeping with the rebels and were just waiting to go home to their families,” he said.
Gaoh expressed concern about the latest restriction on press freedom in Niger, where in August the co-director of the leading independent radio station Saraounya FM, Moussa Kaka, was held for four days after interviewing the brother of a former minister jailed as an accomplice in a murder.
”We thought that freedom of the press was taking root in Niger, but it seems there is always a willingness to censor the media,” Gaoh said.
The hostages were kidnapped from a northern road in July by insurgents who identified themselves as former Tuareg combatants, even as Niger authorities denied that there had been any sort of rebellion by the nomadic pastoralists who roam the desert.
Tandja’s government instead pinned the kidnapping and other attacks on ”armed bandits” who have terrorised the region for nearly a decade since the end of the 1991-to-1995 Tuareg conflict. — Sapa-AFP