(JED/IFEX) – In a 1 June 2001 letter to Leyka Moussa Nyembo, Director-General of the Migrations Department (Direction générale des migrations, DGM), JED protested the attempt by DGM agents at the Kinshasa/N’Djili international airport to prevent JED Secretary-General Mwamba wa ba Mulamba from boarding his Sabena airlines flight to Bangkok via Brussels and Zurich on […]
(JED/IFEX) – In a 1 June 2001 letter to Leyka Moussa Nyembo, Director-General of the Migrations Department (Direction générale des migrations, DGM), JED protested the attempt by DGM agents at the Kinshasa/N’Djili international airport to prevent JED Secretary-General Mwamba wa ba Mulamba from boarding his Sabena airlines flight to Bangkok via Brussels and Zurich on Wednesday 31 May at 8 p.m. (local time). JED sent copies of the letter to the communications and press minister, the interior minister, the head of the National Information Agency (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) and the head of state’s special security advisor. Mwamba’s complete travel documents were returned to him five minutes before the plane’s takeoff, after he telephoned his colleagues at the Ministry of Communications and the Press.
JED’s secretary-general arrived in Thailand to take part in IFEX’s annual general meeting. In Brussels, Mwamba is to speak at the Democratic Republic of Congo Media Day on 14 June, organised by the Media Resistance programme of the Exchange Collective for Appropriate Technology (Collectif d’échange pour la technologie appropriée, COTA).
The DGM agents, who were joined by agents from several airport security services, demanded that Mwamba show official mission orders signed by Minister of Communications and the Press Kikaya bin Karubi. In its protest letter, JED said that the grounds invoked by the security services’ agents were unfounded insofar as “Mwamba, who is neither a state employee nor a public media journalist, was the bearer of a mission order from JED that clearly specified” the mission’s goal. JED added that “the DGM employees at N’Djili airport felt that only the communications minster could authorise such a mission, thereby renouncing the rights of association, assembly, expression and entry and exit from the country that every Congolese citizen is recognised to have ….”
JED took advantage of this incident to denounce all forms of harassment that journalists – both Congolese and foreign – and the media are subjected to at the international airport in N’Djili and at Ngobila Beach. “How can one demand a mission order from a journalist who is leaving on vacation …. Your agents systemically seize all copies of local newspapers in the possession of passengers leaving the country …. Before the landing of each Sabena airplane arriving from Brussels, a communiqué is read to the passengers indicating that, according to DRC authorities, it is forbidden to film and take photos at the airport and even in the city,” stated JED, before concluding that “such schemes give substance to the views of those who think that for several years, the DRC has been one big prison.”
