Africa

On March 2, 2006, Kenyan state agents conducted a commando-style midnight raid on the Standard Group, owner of an independent daily and KTN Television in the capital, Nairobi. The agents seized computers and tapes, vandalized a printing press, and burned roughly 20,000 copies of The Standard, Chief Executive Officer Tom Mshindi told me recently in Nairobi. On each anniversary since, the Standard Group calls for inquiries into the raid. Paul Muite, a former member of parliament from Kabete and a vocal critic of President Mwai Kibaki, made a public statement at the Standard Group's office on this year's anniversary--and believes that, as a result, he is now being followed. 

Eyewitnesses saw him being led away. "We were in our Banjul newsroom on July
7, 2006, working on the next issue of the Daily Observer, when two plainclothes
officers with the Gambian National Intelligence Agency approached Chief," wrote Observer editor
and correspondent Ousman Darboe. "I knew one of the officers as a Corporal
Sey. They told Chief, a subeditor and reporter at the paper, that he was needed
at the Bakau police station for questioning. He went along voluntarily, leaving
his bag behind and saying he was confident he would be back soon."

The whereabouts of "Chief" Ebrima Manneh, right, the Gambian journalist who has been missing since his arrest by state security agents in July 2006, has become an urgent issue again in the country's media houses, homes, and human rights offices. The question needs to be studied carefully, and no one should draw quick conclusions.

New York, April 14, 2009--Gambian authorities must authoritatively account for the whereabouts, health, and legal status of journalist "Chief" Ebrima Manneh, who was taken into government custody by security agents in July 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Authorities, who have held Manneh in secret locations since the arrest, have provided conflicting and incomplete accounts this month regarding his status.

New York, April 10, 2009--Authorities in Republic of Congo should immediately lift their ban on private TV station Canal Bénédiction Plus (CB Plus), the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The ban was enacted in February in response to political coverage in the lead-up to presidential elections in July.

On March 31, 2009, in the commercial city of Abidjan, Judge Aissata Koné convicted Op-Ed Editor Nanankoua Gnamenteh  and Managing Editor Eddy Péhé of  private weekly Le Repère  of charges of  "offending the head of state" over an article in early March that was critical of President Laurent Gbagbo, according to local media reports.

New York, March 31, 2009--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in the southeastern Congolese city of Likasi to allow two private stations to return to the air. 

Testifying at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, Liberian journalist Hassan Bility described a harrowing 1997 reporting trip to Sierra Leone in which he documented Liberian government support for the brutal RUF rebels. His testimony was undoubtedly damaging to defendant Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in sponsoring the RUF, whose signature atrocity was hacking off the limbs of civilians, including young children.

The case had all the hallmarks of a sordid thriller. There was "a rogue politician, a journalist getting killed, a staunchly incurious police, and the media in frenzy," veteran journalist Lansana Gberie wrote in the New African, describing the fatal 2005 beating of editor Harry Yansaneh in Sierra Leone.