A prominent Angolan journalist has been given a six-month suspended jail term for defaming army generals in a book that revealed killings and torture in the country’s diamond fields.



Rafael Marques de Morais described the sentence as a blow to freedom of expression in the southern African country: “It’s sending a message that ‘we can lock you up, including Rafael. We can send him to jail any time we want.’”

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The anti-corruption activist accused the generals of lying to him when they appeared to drop the charges in an out-of-court settlement last week. He believes they were merely trying to avoid the embarrassment of being cross-examined and forced to sit through witness testimony.

The case centred on Marques’s 2011 book, Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola, which detailed more than 100 killings and hundreds of cases of torture allegedly perpetrated by security guards and soldiers in the diamond fields of the Lundas region. It argued that seven generals who co-own a private security company involved in many of the abuses were criminally responsible, prompting them to sue.

In court in the capital, Luanda, on Thursday, judge Adriano Cerveira said: “[I have] decided, on behalf of the people, to give Rafael Marques de Morais, accused of the crime of slander ... a single sentence of [a suspended] six months in prison.”

The court also ordered Marques to “withdraw the book from the market, including on the internet, and not to republish or translate it”. It is unclear how this could be applied to international publishers in Portugal and elsewhere which do not fall under Angola’s jurisdiction.

When the trial began in March, Marques had faced 24 charges that could have resulted in a nine-year prison sentence and a fine of $1.2m (£800,000). But he then held a private meeting with the generals, which included one of president Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s closest allies, and believed he had struck a deal.

Marques, 43, agreed to tell the court that he never made any direct contact with the generals prior to writing the book and accepted that they did not have direct knowledge of the human rights abuses. He never intended to offend the generals but was simply reporting on the suffering of the Lundas people, whose evidence has not been challenged, he added.

But there was a fresh twist this week when, in spite of the agreement, prosecutors suddenly called for a suspended one-month sentence for Marques. The judge went further and imposed a six-month sentence suspended for two years.

Marques believes this will be used as a threat left hanging over all his activism and investigative journalism. He said: “Within two years I can go to prison any time. With this twist, they might say ‘you have not complied with this or that. The judge said you have an agreement with the generals and, if you infringe this agreement, the sentence can be imposed.’

“This is not going to end here. It’s a victory for treachery and ill-faith and it just proves the generals were aware of the abuses in the region. If they were unaware, they would not have resorted to such laws to clear their names in such a crude and manipulative manner.

“I think the judge was a pawn in this. The generals told me they had already talked to the judge and the attorney general of the republic to make the charges go away. Obviously they lied because they were fully aware of what was happening.”

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Asked about the generals’ motives, Marques said: “They managed to avoid a court appearance. It was humiliating for them to be sitting there. With this manoeuvring they managed to extricate themselves from a court appearance and prevent my witnesses giving them all the evidence. I was convicted without any body of evidence.”

Marques, who has run his investigative website Maka Angola for seven years, has been jailed before for branding Dos Santos a dictator. He spent 43 days locked up without charge in 1999, going for days at a time without food or water in solitary confinement.

Watchdogs condemned Thursday’s sentencing of Marques. Jeffrey Smith, the Africa programme officer at the Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said: “The way in which the Angolan judicial system manipulated this case, from the very outset, shows the brazen extent to which the Dos Santos government will go to criminalise freedom of expression.

“This is obviously part of a larger attempt to stifle human rights reporting in Angola, and they are using Rafael Marques to set an example. In doing so, Angola is violating the African charter on human and peoples’ rights, as well as numerous other international human rights conventions which the country is legally bound to follow.”