On January 8, while
Angola was hosting the African Cup of
Nations, the country made worldwide headlines after a deadly attack on the Togolese
national soccer team, which left a coach and a journalist dead. With
international attention turning to the story, a shroud of state censorship and
self-censorship by the Angolan media obscured the factual circumstances of the
attack and its aftermath.
Cabinda, the volatile enclave where the attack took place, is familiar territory to me because of my experience investigating the human rights situation there. The government’s shifting positions on the attack—blaming the shooting on the separatist group Front for the Liberation of Cabinda (FLEC), and then shifting responsibility onto Togo by claiming the team had failed to notify authorities of its itinerary—led me to believe that some crucial parts of the story had been obfuscated. My conversations with several journalists, members of the security forces and local officials highlighted a pattern of state manipulation of information, with the complicity of a private press working under intense political pressure.
Cristóvão Luemba, a reporter with the Catholic-run Radio Ecclésia, experienced the shooting firsthand as bullets flattened the tires of the vehicle of the state newspaper Jornal de Angola he happened to have hitched a ride on. According to Luemba, the Togolese team, which had driven from Pointe Noire in Republic of Congo, was welcomed at the Angolan border by a delegation of Cabinda officials headed by the vice governor of Cabinda, Macário Lemba, around 1:30 p.m. on January 8. The Togolese delegation was then transferred to an official bus provided by the government and escorted in a convoy of 10 vehicles, including two more buses, and more than 30 members of the special police force, colloquially known as “Ninjas.” It was 2:15 p.m. when the convoy came under fire for about half an hour, at a bend near the town hall of the communal administration of Massabi. Stanislas Ocloo, 35, a sports reporter for Togo’s national broadcaster Télévision Togolaise (TVT), and assistant coach Hamelet Abulo were killed.
During the shooting, Luemba was the only
journalist reporting live from the scene, but his station never aired his
report. When I asked Rádio Ecclésia editor
Interestingly, Father Camuto called Luemba that day to congratulate him on his
brave reporting. “The priest told me that they liked my work a lot and that
thanks to it the world learned about the tragedy,” Luemba told me on February
20. But Luemba could not listen to his own radio station, for it only
broadcasts in FM to the capital Luanda. When I informed him that his report had
been censored, having checked this fact with his station’s management, he did
not hide his disappointment. “I risked my life on that coverage,” he said.
Luemba was not the only journalist whose account and local knowledge were ignored that day. Beyond broadcasting the government’s statement condemning the attack, not once did official media solicit the insights of state media journalists travelling with Luemba to help audiences understand what happened.
As a result of this censorship most
international coverage relayed only the following: the minutes of horror the
team endured on the bus, as described by
some players; statements by the Angolan government and comments from
purported separatist
groups claiming responsibility for the attack. The Togolese players
could only describe their ordeal on the bus, and had no further idea of the realities
surrounding them in a foreign territory. International media did not scrutinize
the statements
of one Rodrigues
Mingas, who presented himself as a spokesman of a purported
organization called “FLEC-Military Position” (which claimed responsibility for
the attack). People with knowledge of the area appeared to find the attack
shocking, citing the fact that it took place in an open area offering little
cover for a hit-and-run attack and ringed by several troop garrisons in this
heavily militarized region. They also said the Cabinda police had cleared the
usually busy traffic on the 55-mile (90-kilometer) stretch between the border
and the Cabinda city center.
The censorship compounded with the dearth of knowledge among international
media allowed the government to rewrite the narrative unchallenged. Authorities
sought to garner international sympathy on antiterrorism grounds, then passed
blame onto the Togolese team itself. “If we had been informed, surely, we would
have sent an aeroplane to bring [the Togolese] from Pointe Noire, in Congo, to
Cabinda province. We had no knowledge that Togo had chosen to travel by land to
Cabinda,” declared Justino Fernandes, the head of the Angolan host committee and president of the Angolan soccer
federation, in a January 20 press conference. The statement
contradicted a January 8 Jornal de Angola
print edition story reporting the departure of an official delegation,
including Alberto Macaia, deputy to
the director of the
Print
Share
Delicious
Digg
Google
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Subscribe
You are simple the best Angolan journalist left. I love your writing and continue doing the good work. Whenever you can kindly forward me your articles. I currently live in the USA-Orlando, Florida.
Angola requires good and ethical governance. We cannot talk about economical and human development if the prerequisites to attain that do not exist. At the moment its right to say Angola is being ruled by a group of egotists , introverts , demagogues, sophists, and above all criminals. You cannot pay someone $2/day whe...n it requires $3/day to get to work. A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. We cannot change perception,but can change reality.
Rafael is now the best and courageuos journalist of Angola, besides the fact that one one in Angola love him (the people with political power, even the journalist do not like him because he is running agaist the corruption and impunity of leadership in Angola.
I am angolan and I'm so proud to know that is still someone like Rafael who says no to corruption even when his life is in dandegerous.
Thanks Rafael and keep up the good work you are doing.