By Kemo Cham
Sierra
Leone’s umbrella journalist body has expressed alarm over a series of attacks
on its members while covering Saturday’s presidential run-off election.
The Sierra
Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) said it received reports of several
attacks on journalists in Freetown and elsewhere in the country, leading to the
hospitalization of some of them.
In a
statement issued out on Monday, the association cited three of the incidents which
occurred in Freetown and it said were corroborated with eye witness accounts.
One of these
cases involved a reporter with one of the country’s leading dailies, Concord
Times. The reporter, Patrick Jaiah Kamara, was allegedly beaten by thugs on the
instruction of leading politicians identified as
members of the incumbent All
People’s Congress (APC) party. Kamara named a former Freetown Mayor, Herbert
George Williams and a popular businessman and politician, Sanusi Bruski, as
having ordered the thugs to attack him. His only crime, it said, was using his
camera to take photos of some scenes around a polling center where the
politicians were visiting.
The reporter
himself, in a facebook post, narrated that his cloths were torn and his camera
damaged, in addition to sustaining bruises on his chest, a swollen temple and
cheek. He also lost his digital recorder and some amount of money.
Kamara said
the attack happened in full view of police and military officers.
Two other
journalists, Ibrahim Samura and Thomas Dixon, both of them editors, were
attacked at a separate incident a few kilometers away. Samura, the editor of
the New Age newspaper, was beaten by a group of people who allegedly included a
deputy minister of government, Ibrahim Washingai Mansaray. That incident took
place in the full presence of police personnel and about 50 meters away from
the Lumley Police Station, also in the west end of the city.
Samura was said
to have been taking photo shuts of an incident around the popular Lumley Round
About when his attackers descended upon him. His friend, Dixon, editor of the
Salone Times, got beat up when he attempted to give a helping hand to his
colleague. The SLAJ statement cited eye witness accounts saying their attackers
disembarked from a state registered vehicle.
The APC’s Dr
Samura Kamara is in contest in the presidential race with (Rtd) Brig. Julius
Maada Bio of the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP).
SLAJ said it
also received several reports from the provinces of journalists getting
attacked in the course of the duty on Saturday.
“These
journalists were merely carrying out their duties to monitor and report on the
elections. We cannot overemphasis the importance of their role in ensuring
credible, free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections,” the association states,
while urging the police to speed up its investigation
and bring the culprits to justice.
Sierra Leone
has one of the most pluralistic media landscapes in Africa. And although
journalists have practiced in a relatively peaceful environment in the last over
two decades since the end of its eleven years civil war, there have been many
instances of intimidation and harassment of journalists, which pro-democracy
organisations say have contributed to stifling the freedom of the press.
The last
five years of the Ernest Baii Koroma administration has been identified among
the worst period for journalists. Politicians notably use a notorious criminal
libel law to indiscriminately arrest and detain journalists with the intention
of preventing them from carrying their work.
A few journalists
have met physical attacks. And often these attacks are hardly met with serious
treatment by the police.
This time
round the journalist community wants action taken to set an example thereby
deterring similar attacks in the future.
SLAJ
president, Kelvin Lewis, vowed that the union would resist any attempt of
turning the country into a jungle.
“This
country belongs to all of us and we all have our respective duties too
perform,” he was quoted saying, adding: “We will resist any attempt to reduce
this country to a jungle.”
KC/APA
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