By Ali Idrissou-Toure
COTONOU, Apr 9 2003 (IPS)

Private newspapers in Benin are planning to hold demonstrations this week to protest police brutality against four journalists, including the editor of Le Telegramme, a daily newspaper, published in Cotonou, the country’s economic capital.

The journalists, who will hold the demonstrations in Cotonou, will be calling for ”press freedom in Benin”.

Agapit Maforikan, president of the Union of Private Newspapers of Benin, says three Le Telegramme reporters were ”arrested, brutalised, handcuffed and taken to Cotonou’s Central Police Station” on Apr 1 on orders of the police commissioner, Raymond Fadonougbo.

As soon as Maforikan and Edouard Loko, his counterpart at the Watchdog Group on Ethics and Professional Practice in the Media, heard the news, they rushed to the police station to try to free their three colleagues. But, according to Maforikan, the police commissioner insisted first on seeing Etienne Houessou, Le Telegramme’s editor.

The two agreed to bring Houessou to the police station as long as they received guarantees that he would not be harmed. To their surprise, Houessou was whisked away as soon as he set foot in the station, beaten up and thrown into a cell for several hours. ”Even worse, the police commissioner himself took a few jabs at him,” Maforikan claims. The four journalists were released only after a stormy meeting between police officers and the two media representatives.

Police commissioner Fadonougbo said he summoned the four journalists to the police station because of their ”continual slanders and threats” published in the newspaper. He urged Benin’s media watchdog groups to ”discipline the journalists, especially the editor of Le Telegramme, who, in every edition", he claimed, ”persists in attacking the police even though it is an institution people should respect, after all”.

The two media representatives responded that even if their colleague at Le Telegramme ”had not observed professional ethics, the police has no business attacking journalists”.

Maforikan acknowledged that Le Telegramme had run a series of articles "attacking the police commissioner” and one of his associates. These articles, which police officers have described as ”personal attacks and repeated insults, have created an unhealthy climate between the police and the newspaper”, he explains.

”We live in a law abiding nation and you can’t rough up a journalist just because you don’t like what he writes,” says Maforikan. ”The police commissioner deserves lavish condemnation for his deplorable attempt at taking the law into his own hands by using methods of force at his disposal”.

”Indeed, according to the laws of Benin, there is no such thing as detention to scare off journalists,” he says.

On his part, Soumaila Mama, president of the Association of Journalists of Benin, issued a statement ”condemning the police brutality".

”While recognising that our colleagues in question did commit errors of professional ethics”, their errors ”do not justify, in any way, shape or form, the aggression and assault perpetrated by members of the security force, whose behaviour, on this occasion, is nothing less than a genuine human rights violation,” the statement said.

Media watchdog groups have urged the four journalists to file complaints against the police commissioner for the ”attack, assault and violation of the law”.

The incident has sparked debate across the country, although some Beninoirs say they do not always approve of the ”insulting and slanderous articles” written by some inexperienced journalists.

National Assembly legislator, Assouman Aboudou, believes the police commissioner ”who knows the law and people’s rights, should have controlled his anger and file a complaint against the paper in question”.

Antoine Ayivi, a community leader at Donaten, a suburb of Cotonou, thinks ”journalists have every right to protest. If they don’t, the police will think that they can beat up anyone as they please”.

Last year, the international media watchdog, Reporters Sans Frontieres, based in Paris, said out of 139 countries, Benin ranked 21st in terms of press freedom. Among African countries, it topped the list.

On Monday, Benin’s15 private newspapers shut down their businesses to protest the police brutality against their four colleagues.

In solidarity with the private newspapers, radio and television stations across Benin ran only limited programmes, interspersed with music. The only newspaper that appeared on Monday was the state-owned daily, La Nation.

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