Burkina Faso Blocks Media Outlets over Alleged Massacre Report

Governments of the U.S. and the U.K. have called on the military junta of Burkina Faso to investigate the reported killing of 223 people in the country’s northern region back in February. Issuing a joint statement earlier on Monday, both countries say they are “gravely concerned by reports of massacres of civilians by Burkinabe military forces in late February.”

Late last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a detailed report alleging that soldiers “summarily executed” civilians in Nondin and Soro, two villages in the Thiou district of the northern Yatenga province. In response to the report, Burkina Faso’s junta suspended the radio broadcasts of BBC Africa and Voice of America (VOA) for two weeks, for covering HRW’s investigative story. It also ordered internet service providers to suspend access to the websites of BBC, VOA and HRW.

It extended the suspension to more media outlets, including a two-week broadcasting suspension of French television network TV5Monde. The websites of German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), French newspapers Le Monde and Ouest-France, British newspaper The Guardian, and African agencies APA and Ecofin have also been blocked until further notice, according to the junta-led regulatory authority, Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC).

“The blocking of dw.com and other media in Burkina Faso means the people there are being deprived of the important right to independent information,” DW’s Managing Director of Programming Nadja Scholz said in a statement on its website. The broadcaster also shared alternative ways for residents of Burkina Faso to access its website and broadcasts, including the use of VPNs.

In suspending local access to these outlets, Burkina Faso’s junta has rebuked HRW’s report. Communications Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said, in a statement, that the accusations of a massacre are baseless, adding that “the media campaign orchestrated around these accusations fully shows the unavowed intention … to discredit our fighting forces.”

According to HRW, soldiers killed 44 people in Nondin village, including 20 children, while 179 people were killed in Soro, including 36 children. HRW said it interviewed 23 people for its report, including 14 witnesses to the killings, who said the soldiers came to both villages claiming that the locals had assisted armed insurgents in attacking a military base outside the provincial capital, Ouahigouya.

“Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being complicit with the jihadists [Islamist fighters],” a 32-year-old woman survivor from Soro who was shot in the leg said. “They said we do not cooperate with them [the army] because we did not inform them about the jihadists’ movements.”

Burkina Faso has been dealing with armed insurgents linked to ISIS (ISIL) for several years. The West African country has also witnessed two coups since 2022, and the takeover of the military has yet to definitely stem the insecurity issues, with allegations that the army is also terrorizing civilians.

Last June, HRW published a report stating that state armed forces were guilty of human rights abuses, including summary executions. It also stated, in January, that the military is guilty of indiscriminate drone strikes that have resulted in civilian casualties.

While Ouedraogo said that killings in Nondin and Soro “led to the opening of a legal inquiry,” there’s no express admission that civilians were massacred by Burkinabe soldiers.