The stocky gendarme at the roadblock on the edge of town sticks his face in the car window, points a finger and issues a warning.
“You had better tell the truth!” he says, jabbing a finger in my direction. “I don’t want to see any more of these lies!”
Like most representatives of Ivory Coast’s government, he is upset about news reports from rebel-held Bouake that suggest the armed insurgents who seized half this country in September are something less than evildoers bent on destroying the nation.
That is certainly the view held in much of the administrative capital, Abidjan, where government-allied newspapers and radio stations call the rebels terrorists.
“Rebels Made Me Drink My Uncle’s Blood” screamed one front page of a tabloid linked to the ruling party.
Reporters for opposition newspapers that have refused to pick up the official line have been beaten by uniformed thugs and by mobs, who are told that unpatriotic journalists are the enemy and in the pay of the insurgents.
Government officials say that, in a time of war, this in no way represents an attack on freedoms of the press.
Journalists “have a duty to help our society get out of this crisis,” says Bailly Sery, Ivory Coast’s minister of communications. When the nation is under attack, reporters “should be free to write what they want, but they should bear the responsibility,” he warned. “If you write against the interests of the nation, our justice system might deal with you.”
Responsible journalism in the Ivory Coast is narrowly defined these days. When the opposition Patriot newspaper ran a graphic showing a map of the Ivory Coast torn in two, roughly along the lines of the current division, officials accused them of promoting sedition.
Such a graphic “says you’re in favor of the partition of our country,” Sery warned. He said such representations would not be allowed and “if this means we’re reducing their freedom, we’re glad to do it.”
“This is a situation of war,” he said. “To win a war it’s not enough to have soldiers and weapons.” Winning public opinion, he said, is also key.
The problem with the new hard line on information is that the government’s view of the truth is not entirely accurate.
Certainly the disgruntled soldiers who seized the north of the Ivory Coast on Sept. 19 did attempt a coup, violating democratic norms and threatening a democratically elected president. That, in the government’s view, puts them in the same camp as dictators and terrorists, a camp the government says it must fight by any means.
The problem, as the insurgents point out, is that Ivory Coast’s government may have forced the uprising by systematically denying voting rights to the nation’s Muslim-dominated north. Families that have lived in Ivory Coast for generations–some longer than the southerners who lead the country–are called foreigners and denied identification cards that are necessary to vote.
The nation’s southern leaders, in an effort to keep the country in “Ivorian” hands, have banned from the presidency anyone with a parent born abroad. That’s a big exclusion in a nation of immigrants, and has kept Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister and one of the country’s most powerful northerners, from being able to run for the highest office.
Government officials have been particularly infuriated by news reports that the rebels are, as Sery notes distastefully, “kind, nice.”
In fact, rebel soldiers have summarily executed captured police and soldiers as well as thieves. But visits to rebel-held areas suggest most of the other gory charges are largely fantasy.
Rebels in turn charge that it is the government that has urged people in Abidjan to take action and protect themselves from insurgents–a plea that has led to the destruction of more than a dozen large immigrant shantytowns in the capital, to numerous assassinations, and to foreigners and journalists being attacked on the streets.
The rebels, who have launched their own newspaper, radio station and television programming in the north, “have been good communicators, transforming us, the victims, to victimizers,” Sery concedes.
In Abidjan, for the time being, human-rights officials say it remains dangerous to express views of the truth that the government doesn’t share.
“There’s no freedom of expression here, no freedom of opinion,” charges Ibrahima Doumbia, a prominent lawyer and vice president of the Ivorian Movement for Human Rights. “Political life is dead. Anyone who disagrees with the government is at risk.”
