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July 25, 2025 – Burkina Faso –
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) confirmed that Guezouma Sanogo, president of Burkina Faso’s Journalists Association (AJB), and radio Femina FM journalist Phil Roland Zongo returned to Ouagadougou and their families on July 21, after enduring nearly four months of forced military conscription by the junta. The duo had been seized in March, soon after publicly denouncing media repression and the targeted militarization of journalists.
Their release followed the earlier reunion of AJB vice president Boukari Ouoba, BF1 journalist Luc Pagbelguem, and columnist Kalifara Séré, who were liberated in mid-July after enduring similar enforced enlistment. In total, six journalists have been forcibly drafted into the army within less than a year—a brutal pattern of state-sanctioned suppression of press freedoms.
The original conscription of Sanogo, Ouoba, Pagbelguem, Séré, and others was preceded by their arrest on March 24–25, 2025, reportedly by plainclothes agents linked to the National Intelligence Agency, immediately following their criticism of the military’s increases in censorship and control over public media. Initially, their fate was unknown, raising alarms of enforced disappearance from colleagues and civil society groups.
On April 2, a video circulated online showing the three journalists clad in military fatigues at a purported military base, speaking in guarded terms about covering operations—raising widespread concern that the junta was staging the footage to legitimize forced conscription while coercing compliance. Both RSF and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), along with its pan-African affiliate FAJ, condemned the conscriptions as an unprecedented violation of journalistic identity, dignity, and freedom, calling for the immediate release of the conscripted journalists and restoration of the AJB.
Despite the release of the six journalists, three remain unaccounted for: investigative reporter Serge Oulon, BF1 columnist Adama Bayala, and Alain Traoré. Human rights groups and media advocates have emphasized the ongoing threat of forced conscription being used as a repressive tactic to silence dissent and control information in Burkina Faso under President Ibrahim Traoré’s junta.
The events exemplify a sustained campaign of intimidation against journalists through legal and extrajudicial means. International bodies pressure the junta to cease the militarization of civilians and allow independent journalism to operate without fear.
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