Burkina Faso’s Higher Council of Communications, on 7 October, announced its suspension of the Voice of America (VOA) from broadcasting for three months. This comes after a 19 September programme, during which a VOA reporter, Bagassi Koura, described as courageous the 17 September attack on Bamako, Mali, carried out by the Jihadist group, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).
In that same interview, Koura claimed Malian Armed Forces did not take any security measures to prevent the attack. The Communications Council says VOA fabricated casualty statistics without citing sources for the figures reported, which it claims are designed to crush the morale of Burkinabé and Malian military forces.
VOA had earlier been suspended for two weeks in April for relaying a Human Rights Watch report accusing the Burkinabè army of human rights abuses.
The 17 September terrorist attack in Bamako occurred a day after the first anniversary of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), the new regional economic and security alliance formed by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The three AES countries federated in July to share policies. All three countries have evicted French troops stationed within their territories, with Niger becoming the first African country to expel US Air Force personnel stationed through the US Africa Command (AFRICOM).
In recent months, Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traoré has criticised US imperialism and it is believed that the bias shown in reports by VOA is a direct result of its status as a US-state media outlet funded by the United States Congress.
The US Agency for Global Media, which oversees US-funded media outlets like VOA, on its website, is explicit about its objective of serving the ‘long-range interests of the United States”, doing this “by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio.”
VOA’s audience is spread across 22 Francophone African countries. It also broadcasts in African languages, such as Fulani, Bambara, Hausa, Swahili, Somali, and others.
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