Mali’s media regulator has decided to suspend French news channel LCI for two months after what it said were “false accusations” by a consultant against the Malian army and its Russian allies, in a decision released Saturday.
“LCI television services are withdrawn from the packages of all distributors of authorized radio or television broadcasting services in Mali for a period of two months” from August 23, 2024, the Malian High Authority for Communication (HAC) said on Saturday.
The junta in Mali broke off its long-standing alliance with France and its European partners in 2022, to turn militarily and politically towards Moscow. Since then, Malian colonels have suspended the widely followed French media outlets France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI). France 2 was also suspended in early 2024. Correspondents from a number of foreign media outlets have been forced to leave, go into exile or remain silent due to being unable to work.
The program entitled “Wagner decimated in Mali: the hand of kyiv” criticized
According to the HAC, LCI, a private continuous news channel of the TF1 group, broadcast a program on July 27 entitled “Wagner decimated in Mali: the hand of kyiv” with Colonel Michel Goya, LCI’s military consultant, as guest.
The HAC accuses Colonel Goya of having made “denigrating remarks, gratuitous assertions and false accusations of abuses against the Malian armed forces and their Russian partners”. It adds that the guest also called “for open support for terrorism under the pretext of supporting Ukraine against Russia”.
In late July, the Malian army and its ally, the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, suffered a heavy defeat in fighting with separatists and jihadists in the north of the country.
A Ukrainian military intelligence official, Andriy Yusov, had implied that kyiv had provided information to the rebels so they could carry out their attack, which subsequently led to the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Mali and Ukraine.
In Burkina Faso and Niger, Mali’s neighbors, soldiers also seized power by force in 2022 and 2023 and took measures against the foreign press. In Burkina Faso, LCI was suspended in June 2023 after a journalist’s comments on the situation related to jihadist violence were described as “false information.”