Burundi’s radio silence: Political crisis forces stations off air

The crackdown began even before President Nkurunziza announced his re-election bid. In January, Rugurika was arrested and charged on four counts including complicity in murder, harboring criminals, violating the confidentiality of a judicial investigation and “failing to show solidarity,” all of which Reporters Without Borders deemed “absurd.” At the time, RPA had been investigating the murder of three Italian nuns, who are said to have accidentally uncovered evidence that Burundi’s ruling party is training a militia in neighboring DRC. 

Rugurika was released a month later, but tension continued to build. Shortly before President Nkurunziza’s announcement that he would be running for a third term, Niyonzima uncovered evidence of an illicit arms distribution. He acquired written testimony from a whistleblower member of the Imbonerakure, the ruling party’s youth group, which detailed exactly how many weapons had been distributed among its members, and where. 

For Niyonzima, threats from would-be assassins loyal to the state are nothing new. In 2012, members of the Imbonerakure tracked him down and trapped him in a bar in Busanze, he says. They struck him with a sharpened crowbar in the back of the head and left him for dead. Against the odds, he survived.

The day protesters opposed to the president’s third term took to the streets, the government shut down RPA. They also severed the lines of two other key independent stations, Radio Isanganiro and Bonesha FM, so they could not broadcast in the rest of the country. Just over 1 percent of Burundians have Internet access and few can afford televisions, so this plunged rural areas into an information black hole.

It was in this context that a general known to oppose the president’s third term, Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare, attempted to stage a coup d’état. On May 13, after President Nkurunziza left the country to discuss the crisis with leaders of other countries in the region, Gen. Niyombare announced that he had “dismissed” the president and would form a transitional government. 

Victorious protesters stormed the building of Rema FM, a pro-government radio station. (Reporters Without Borders has called it a “government mouthpiece”). 

In the weeks and months before the coup, Rema FM had been broadcasting messages that experts deem to be dangerous and ethnically divisive. On April 29, the anniversary of the 1972 massacre of tens of thousands of Hutus by Tutsis, prominent lawyer Henri Hatungimana had insisted on air that the protests against President Nkurunziza were concentrated in predominantly Tutsi areas. Images of tires set afire by the protesters, Hatungimana said, evoked the ethnic attacks of the 1990s. The government has also referred to the protest as a Tutsi insurrection, which is in line with the broadcasts of Rema FM. 

Early on the morning of May 14, loyalists responded by setting the RPA building on fire. They also attacked Bonesha FM and Radio Isanganiro. Even the state broadcaster went briefly off-air that day as fighting between loyalist and dissident troops for control of the airwaves intensified. (The government has denied carrying out a “revenge raid”). 

Since all independent radio stations were off-air, the dissidents said they needed to seize the state radio to inform the country. A day after the attempted coup, only those in the capital and those with access to televisions knew what was going on.

By nightfall, an uneasy silence settled on the city. The next morning, the world awoke to the news that Burundi’s coup leaders had surrendered, defeated by the military. But since there was no independent radio on-air, few people in Burundi knew. 

“It's impossible,” said one protester, who gave his name as Tony Montana, when he was told that the coup had failed. One of the few in his neighborhood of Buyenze to own a TV, Montana then returned from the streets to his house around 9 am to watch the morning bulletin of France24. He was devastated by the news. His bravado — “I will leave the country this second if the president is back,” he had said moments earlier —  evaporated.

Niyonzima came out of hiding briefly to walk past his beloved RPA, its pea-green facade blackened from the arson attack. “Horrible,” he recalls. 

He was planning to wait out the crisis but in the early hours of May 17, the armed men in civilian clothes forced their way into his house as his wife and two daughters slept. (He had decided it was prudent to sleep elsewhere given the security context.) The men searched the house for Niyonzima, then stormed off after soldiers turned up. He believes he is being targeted by Burundi’s intelligence agency and has been on the run since. 

Niyonzima says that the attacks on RPA and other radio stations are meant not just to silence their journalists but also to destroy the evidence they hold of crimes committed by the government. When he departed his home, he had with him only a 10,000 Burundian Franc note (worth $6), his ID cards, two mobile phones and a carefully folded piece of paper — the testimony written by the Imbonerakure. 

Niyonzima says he believes strongly in the power of journalism to hold authorities to account. “This is what pushes us to keep going, even if our lives at risk,” he says. In particular, he believes that the proof of arms distributions that RPA has collected could one day bring the implicated authorities to trial. 

“I make sure that all my evidence is shared, so that even if I go, someone else will be able to see this through to the end,” he says.