Cameroon sports journalist Eyong Macdella Bessong assaulted over accreditation card dispute

Cameroonian authorities must identify and hold to account the policeman who assaulted journalist Eyong Macdella Bessong while she was covering a May 18 football match in Buea, the capital of the Southwest Region, and should hold accountable the stadium official who manhandled her and asked police to remove her from the property, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Thursday. Bessong, a reporter for pan-African privately owned sports news website kick442.com, was accosted and dragged away from the main pitch minutes before the opening whistle by Njonje Mbua, the Molyko Omnisport Stadium’s director, because she could not produce a hard copy of her press accreditation and only had a digital one on her cell phone, according to news reports, kick442.com editor Angu Lesley, and Bessong, who both spoke to CPJ via messaging app and phone. Minutes earlier, the digital copy of her press accreditation was accepted by an official controlling access to the match, those sources said. Mbua refused to recognize the press pass on Bessong’s phone and insisted that she either buy a ticket or return home to retrieve her physical press pass, the journalist said. She told CPJ that the stadium director manhandled her and grabbed her torso, touching her breast, so she bit his hand, prompting him to order a group of six policemen to remove her from the property. Bessong said two uniformed police officers, whose names she did not know, grabbed her and tried to drag her away from the spot. When a group of footballers recognized her as a journalist and asked what was going on, Bessong explained and pulled out her phone to show them her press card. One of the two policemen mistakenly believed she had taken photos of him and was showing them to the footballers and ordered her to delete them, Bessong said. The policeman then pulled her hair, slapped her at least three times across her face and neck, head-butted her, threw her on the ground, kicked her, and called her a prostitute, she told CPJ. “Authorities and the Cameroonian Football Association must take swift and decisive action against the stadium official and policeman who humiliated and viciously assaulted sports journalist Eyong Macdella Bessong while on assignment,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “The chauvinism and sexist slurs that female sports journalists endure are bad enough, but to compound these with gratuitous violence is simply intolerable. Journalists must be free to do their jobs without harassment from any quarter.”