African Media and Conflict
By Abiodun Onadipe and David Lord
Part Four - In Their Own Words
Journalist in Exile - By Bunmi Aborisade
Journalists here in Africa and elsewhere in the world have over the years played various roles in conflict situations because they are often at the centre of one conflict or another, providing a forum for conflicting parties to air their views or offering a helping hand in conflict management and resolution, essentially facilitating the mediator’s role.
It has thus become imperative for African journalists, who always face a day-to-day struggle for survival and who are engaged in a profession that is fragile and fractious to become more aware of the roles they play in reporting on conflict. The destructive nature of conflict in any society has made the call for the principle of fair and accurate reporting of events on the part of the journalist necessary, if the journalist is to help bring a conflict situation to an end rather than escalating it.
Even when journalists decide to play a positive role in a conflict situation, they run the risk of being objects of attack by the warring factions. In the process, many journalists have been killed by combatants, some have been maimed for life, others jailed and brutalised, while the fortunate ones are forced into exile.
This writer belongs to the last group. As a journalist, I found myself in the thick of the political crisis in Nigeria which had been lingering since 1993, when the fairest and the freest election in Nigeria was callously annulled by the military dictator, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Like other Nigerian journalists, the battle for the validation of the annulled election became a matter of life and death, with the Nigerian military on one side and the opposition press and other pro-democracy groups on the other.
The climax of my ordeal at the hands of the Nigerian military authorities during this period was in 1996, when I was jailed without any substantive charges being brought against me. I was imprisoned for 28 days, tortured and kept under inhuman conditions at three separate detention camps.
No sooner had I regained my freedom on May 13, 1996, than I became embroiled in another potentially dangerous problem, still concerning the crisis in the country. This time around, the issue was not directly connected to my agitation for the validation of the annulled election, but with the publication of an account of my ordeal in detention. This provoked the security agencies to begin a frantic search for me in order to arrest me on more false charges.
Apart from this, I gathered that what infuriated the security operatives most in the account I narrated was the revelation of the ordeals of other Nigerians held unjustly by agents of the Nigerian military junta. One such revelation in the story of my arrest, which irked the military authorities, was the detention of a 13-year-old Nigerian/British citizen who had been arrested and detained because his father, a prominent opposition figure, was not available when the security agents called at their house to arrest him.
Also, the story of my prison experience included the ordeal of a Nigerian Army officer (a major), who was detained for attending a birthday party organised by the defence attaché of a foreign embassy in Nigeria, who happened to be his friend. The major was said to have been confronted upon his arrest with a recording of a conversation he had had with the diplomat, which indicated that the attaché’s telephone had been bugged by Nigerian security agencies.
Thus, in recounting my ordeal at the hands of the military authorities, I inadvertently provided them with reasons to re-arrest and subsequently try me for espionage -- an offence for which the major was later tried and jailed for 18 months and then dismissed from the Nigerian Army. But before the security officials could implement their plot to re-arrest me, I had fled into exile in Ghana.
All this intimidation could have been avoided, if the society in which we operate had imbibed the true spirit of conflict prevention and resolution, instead of paying lip service to these concepts.
Even while in exile, one is not absolutely free from the conflict one fled from back home. That is to say that the very conflict I fled continued to haunt me here in Ghana where I continue to practice my profession.
My experience at the hands of Ghanaian security operatives was not that different from that suffered during my detention in Nigeria. On May 27, 1998, I was picked up by Ghanaian immigration officials and threatened with deportation, despite my legal status as a refugee-journalist. My offence, according to the immigration authorities, was that my writings were critical of my home government and were likely to endanger the relationship between the governments of Nigeria and Ghana.
Ordinarily, I would have expected that this unpleasant situation was amicably resolved by the government of Ghana -- a democratic country -- but because of the lack of the spirit of reconciliation, matters were allowed to lead to an embarrassing situation, which resulted in the seizure of my Nigerian passport and an order to report daily to the immigration authorities. This was a directive I had to defy for reasons of self-preservation. I went underground to avoid possible deportation to Nigeria.
My experiences are just a taste of the numerous ordeals journalists in Africa and elsewhere in the world face in the course of their work. Journalism, therefore, at all times -- be it peacetime or during conflict -- has become a downright dangerous profession to such an extent that the traditional view of neutral and accurate reportage of events is no longer a reality. This development sometimes joins the journalist and the cataclysmic events swirling around him in an inseparable tangle.
So, considering the danger involved in the coverage of events by journalists during crises, the concept of conflict resolution and prevention becomes relevant to guide the journalist in the discharge of his duties to society, when most African journalists are engaged in some of the most serious battles of their professional lives.
What is still unclear, however, is whether owners of media establishments and African dictators will allow the media to perform their traditional roles of informing, educating and entertaining the public. The recent developments in Africa give rise to this fear. This revolves around cases where the media have been turned into a veritable war machine to quell an opponent or champion -- causes detrimental to these traditional roles of the media.
Bunmi Aborisade is Deputy Editor with The Independent, based in Accra, Ghana
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