Taking sides: reporting from a polarised country

RNW has a network of correspondents around the world. Some of these journalists work in countries where press freedom is severely restricted. In our summer series “The limits of free speech”, a number of reporters describe their struggle to tell true stories.
Bram Posthumus in Côte d’Ivoire
Abidjan, a few years before the eruption of violence that followed the 2010 elections. I am sitting on a terrace overlooking the lagoon. It’s late, and across the water in the city centre the lights are twinkling. A mesmerising scene; a welcome moment’s time-out from the discussion I’m having.
Which side?
"We have to fight," says an Ivorian colleague, banging his fist on the table. "That’s what we journalists must do. We must fight!"
"But hang on, isn't journalism about reporting the facts and presenting them the best we can?"
His answer to my feeble objection is a weary smile. Look, it’s not how things work here. Everyone is taking sides."" And then, ominously prescient: "War will come, it’s inevitable. We don’t have time for niceties. Which side are you on – that is the question."
Truth is betrayal
In 2012, traveling from Abidjan to the troubled west of the country and picking up the newspapers, I was haunted by this and similar conversations I had had. Impartial journalism remains on life support. Colleagues who have been trying to report the facts to the best of their knowledge have been under tremendous pressure to spin their stories to fit an existing political agenda. Try to be objective and you will be marked…as a traitor. The results can be – and have been – brutal: intimidation is common, as are physical attacks.
Two truths
There exist, in essence, two ways of looking at Côte d’Ivoire’s recent history. Supporters of former president Laurent Gbagbo say that the enemy won the last presidential election through fraud and that France, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court have all conspired to make sure their man never becomes president again. The other side, that of current president Alassane Ouattara, maintains that it rules with legitimacy and that the Gbagbo camp are bad losers. They have no-one to blame but themselves.
Sensational, partisan, false
The truth is somewhere in the middle but that won’t get you far in Côte d’Ivoire. Look at the front pages of the newspapers. You can immediately tell which side is represented. It has even spawned a new type of media consumer: people who only see the front pages and then pontificate about them for the rest of the day. “Titrologues”, they are called. The problem with the front pages is threefold: they are sensational, they are partisan and frequently they are outright lies. And all sides are guilty of this.
I have read about bombing raids that never happened, made-up health scares involving prominent politicians, actions by the UN that simply never took place, wild allegations against individuals – and so on. This is what “fighting journalism” leads to and the results are ever deeper fissures in Ivorian society.
Spirit of Le Pen
Media have always been central to the Ivorian conflict. During Gbagbo's final days in Abidjan in April 2011, a ferocious battle raged around the compound of RTI, Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivorienne. This is the main propaganda arm of any sitting government, the current one included. It was here that I had first come across the toxic divisiveness of the Ivorian debate, a few years before my lagoon-side discussion.
I was interviewing a sociologist, recommended to me by an RTI journalist. "Talk with him. He’s very good, very objective." But my interviewee became very agitated when I raised the issue that is crucial to this country’s problems: Ivoirité. Who is an Ivorian citizen – and who is not?
His response, his way of describing non-Ivorians reminded me of a notorious French politician. I told him so. "You sound exactly like Jean-Marie Le Pen." With this comparison to the far-right nationalist Frenchman, he ended the interview in an angry huff. The problem is that this Le Pen-esque spirit still hovers over the Ivorian media landscape. It’s either black-or-white. There is very little in between. Good news for the “Titrologues.” Bad news for journalists trying to do their job.