(JED/IFEX) – On 19 May 2004, judicial inspectors arrested Lucien-Claude Ngongo, publisher of the Kinshasa-based newspaper “Fair Play”. Ngongo was held for six days at the Kinshasa-Gombe High Court’s detention centre, before being transferred to the Kinshasa Penitentiary and Reeducation Centre (Centre pénitentiaire et de rééducation de Kinshasa, CPRK, formerly the Makala central prison). On […]
(JED/IFEX) – On 19 May 2004, judicial inspectors arrested Lucien-Claude Ngongo, publisher of the Kinshasa-based newspaper “Fair Play”. Ngongo was held for six days at the Kinshasa-Gombe High Court’s detention centre, before being transferred to the Kinshasa Penitentiary and Reeducation Centre (Centre pénitentiaire et de rééducation de Kinshasa, CPRK, formerly the Makala central prison).
On the morning of 27 May, JED was able to visit the journalist in his cell. While the official reason for his arrest remains unknown, Ngongo told JED that he was questioned several times in regards to a series of articles published in his paper concerning a dispute between William Damseaux and Berge Nanikian, two foreign businessmen based in Kinshasa. The dispute has been the focus of much media attention over the past several months. Ngongo, in particular, had written an article entitled, “The ‘indigent’ William Damseaux is not the sort of investor this country needs”. In the article, the paper took up the cause of Damseaux’s nemesis, Nanikian. The officers questioning Ngongo wanted to know, among other things, what the journalist had meant by “indigent” and “maffioso”, two terms used in the article in question and considered grounds for a damages claim.
In its 27 May edition, “Fair Play” once again took up the Damseaux-Nanikian issue, with the headline, “Courts refuse to hear talk of [Damseaux’s] ‘indigence’ [. . .].” In the article, the paper alleges that in October 1998, Damseaux, a Belgian businessman and long-time resident of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is also the country’s main frozen goods importer, applied for and obtained “indigent” status from the Kinshasa-Gombe High Court, to avoid having to pay the administrative fees in a pending court case against Nanikian, who is of Lebanese-Armenian descent. In the same issue, “Fair Play” published a 19 April 2004 letter from the assistant justice minister to the judicial services inspector, which calls into question the “indigent” status granted to the Belgian businessman by the High Court.
