Journalists and Teacher Jailed in Mali for ‘Insulting’ the President
By Daniel Hollingsworth
June 21, 2007 | Printer Friendly

Reuters reports that five journalists have been arrested in Mali following the publication of an essay contest describing the infidelity of a fictional president, and the teacher who assigned the topic has also been detained.  Bassirou Kassim Minta, a teacher at the Lycee Nanaissa Santara, assigned his students an essay on a subject entitled, “The Mistress of the President” about a young student prostitute who has a child by a president and fights for it to be recognized.  Seydina Oumar Diarra, a reporter for the Info-Matin daily, wrote a story about the assignment, and a Bamako prosecutor subsequently ordered his detention for committing an “outrage to the president,” Amadou Toumani Toure.  Four other newspapers followed suit, and representatives of these publications were also arrested for “complicity in an insult against the president.”

These arrests have been met by widespread outrage, both within the Malian media and civil society and throughout the international watchdog community.  Voice of America reports that Moussa Bolly, editor of the newspaper Les Echos, whose director was one of the individuals arrested, said that “the press and civil society are mobilizing to fight this attack on civil liberties to show that Mali's young democracy will not accept setbacks.”  Reporters Without Borders is among the groups that have most sharply criticized the arrests, and Leonard Vincent, head of its Africa desk believes that the arrests are the result of an individual decision by the prosecutor.  He told Voice of America, “The magistrate has used a procedure where he decided alone to open a procedure against the journalists.  So we have no indication whatsoever that there was a political order.”  Still, Reporters Without Borders and other organizations have criticized the Malian president’s silence to this point on the matter.

The BBC writes that the World Association of Newspapers had recently raised the issue of laws prohibiting the insulting of the president, calling the existence of these laws in 48 of 53 African countries “the greatest scourge” of press freedom on the continent.  Bolly believes that the true motivation for the arrests is what President Toure and others in his camp perceived to be unfair coverage biased toward the opposition in Mali’s recent presidential elections.

These presidential elections were widely hailed as free and fair, and Mali has been deemed as a leading example of democratic development in Africa.  Vincent from says that “for several years now Mali has been seen as an example in West Africa in terms of political freedom and especially press freedom.  The press is very free.  There are a lot of opposition newspapers, a lot of independent newspapers, private radio, and no major problem has occurred for something like four years now.”  This perception underscores the argument made by domestic and international observers that President Toure should intervene to bring about the release of these individuals by publicly disavowing the arrests.

References:

Reuters: Mali editors held over fictional president’s fling

BBC: Essay ‘insults’ Mali’s president

Voice of America: Malian Authorities Fail to See Humor in Satirical Essay, Jail Journalists