Description

Peace media uses radio, television, and print journalism to promote peace, to disseminate truthful information or alternate viewpoints that could turn public sentiment toward peaceful resolution of conflict, or to counter "hate radio."

Objectives

Reconciliation-oriented radio and television programs support conflict prevention and mitigation and counter abuse of the media to incite violence by presenting issues fairly and making available alternative sources of information.

Expected outcome or impact

In countries where most of the population is illiterate and television is rare, radio is the key means to reach the public with news and information and influence people, positively or negatively.

Peace media can reach groups who risk participating in violent conflict and can encourage their participation in change. Hate media can be countered by jamming or otherwise interfering with hate broadcasts.

Relationship to conflict prevention and mitigation

The media can be an agent for or against conflict and its resolution: "the media mediates conflict, whether it intends to or not." The use of media defines, shapes, and often exacerbates conflict by the choice of stories covered, those omitted, and sources used. At the same time, media can be deliberately used to mitigate or prevent conflict, though medias’ conflict resolution potential is largely unacknowledged and under-utilized. Open communications are important to maintain or reestablish stability and orderly change. Peace media are conscious attempts to take a role in conflict prevention or mitigation.

Implementation

Organizers

Independent indigenous organizations or foreign governments, NGOs, or multilateral or regional organizations can set up and support peace media efforts. The UN or foreign government military forces can undertake initiatives to jam hate radio or assault hate radio transmitters.

Participants

Current and prospective journalists, editors, and media owners can participate in peace media endeavors. Implementation staff have included members of foreign media, representatives of international media associations, and foreign educational institution media departments.

Activities

To help prevent or reduce conflict, those promoting peace media can:

· Discourage and avoid the use of radio and other media to promote ethnic and political conflict.

¨ Counter use of the media for such purposes. ¨ Support efforts to deliver accurate, timely news and information in a non-polemical manner that can counter the distortions broadcast by others.

¨ Provide broadcast time to opposing views.

· Exert pressure on states to not have a monopoly on use of radio or control of the media.

· Provide training in political reporting and investigative journalism, reducing bias, and other steps to enhance media professionals’ capabilities, including peace training, as covered in a separate profile in this section.

· Promote laws that monitor and ensure that media are not used to undermine democracy and individual freedom, violate human rights, or incite violent conflict.

· Develop independent organizations to keep track of rumors circulating in the country that might incite conflict, then use media to refute them and disseminate the truth as widely as possible.

· Distribute radios and batteries or windup generator radios nationwide, especially in rural areas, to give recipients access to accurate news and more balanced reporting. This can include distributing cassette recorders and tapes so that peace radio programming can be played at public meetings and in markets.

· Provide primary and relay transmitters so that signals can be picked up throughout the country.

· Encourage international sanctions against hate media.

· Provide a forum for moderate voices to ensure they are heard in the media.

· Organize a multilateral or regional organization such as the United Nations to install and operate a radio station prior to a crisis or transition period, particularly in situations where genocide or other atrocities are imminent or underway. Voice of America and other foreign radio stations could do the same. Broadcasts should be in indigenous languages so that a broad segment of the population can understand them.

· Develop a mobile radio broadcasting unit and acquire suitable portable transmitters, a capability appropriate for the UN so that fully equipped teams could be ready to deploy when violent episodes such as genocides were imminent or underway. These teams could include a radio jamming unit with a mandate to interfere with the signals of radio stations inciting listeners to commit genocide or other violent atrocities.

· Expand the mandate of national government broadcasters such as Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Deutsche Welle to intervene with bulletins and programs when genocides or other gross violations were imminent or underway.

· Provide funds to facilitate the broadcast of foreign, reconciliation-oriented programs in local languages when crises are anticipated.

· Use peace-oriented programming to counter incitements to violence, help disseminate the truth or present conflicting accounts of events when the truth is unclear.

¨ Peace radio broadcasts could warn perpetrators of hate radio that they will be stigmatized by the world, brought to justice and prosecuted if they persist with violent acts such as genocide.

¨ Programming could make leaders more accountable to their followers by broadcasting what they say and do.

¨ Broadcasts could inform the public when peace agreements have been signed.

¨ Broadcasts could urge citizens to defend friends and neighbors from beleaguered groups who are being attacked by hate media, encouraging them to offer them refuge, mobilize support for the victims among other citizens, and warn the intended victims.

· Support NGOs engaged in peace media efforts such as Search for Common Ground.

Journalists can take steps to penalize others in their profession who contribute to disseminating hate propaganda. For example, at its 1995 Annual World Congress, the International Federation of Journalists (IJF) condemned the misuse of the media in the countries of former Yugoslavia to spread national and religious hatred against other peoples and national communities. The IJF is establishing an international commission to investigate war propaganda and hate media. The commission will investigate journalists, media organizations and media authorities who have published or broadcast war propaganda or promoted ethnic hatred. The IJF is also organizing an international seminar on "journalism ethics in an age of racism and xenophobia."

Cost considerations

Peace radio initiatives are relatively inexpensive.

Other resource considerations

Creating a new radio station or supporting an existing radio station to disseminate peace messages could require primary and relay transmitters. To more widely disseminate the messages, radios and batteries can be distributed and additional relay transmitters set up. Peace media can require training personnel and equipment.

Set-up time

With access to the right equipment, peace radio broadcasting can be rapidly set up and operationalized from within the country or from outside and hate radio can be jammed (or transmitters destroyed) quickly.

Timeframe to see results

Once in place, peace media measures can show rapid results and have a long-lasting impact on the conflict situation.

Conflict context

Stages of conflict

Ideally, actions in support of peace media or to counter hate media should be taken in the early stages of conflict, before widespread violent conflict. Peace media can even be used in a pre-crisis situation to build support for crisis prevention efforts. Peace media can also be helpful during the more advanced stages and in the aftermath of a conflict to aid in reconciliation efforts.

Type of conflict

Peace Radio is an especially valuable tool when the media is being used by perpetrators to incite racial, regional, or other violent political conflict within a country.

Causes of conflict

Peace media can have both an operational and structural conflict prevention effect.

Past practice

Within the Greater Horn of Africa

Rwanda illustrates hate radio’s effects on violent conflict and suggests how peace radio might have mitigated the violence. The Hutu government used the radio in 1994 to help unleash the massacre of its opponents, mainly Tutsi. The dissemination of hate propaganda involved spreading ethnic hatred and inciting ethnocide and genocide. This spread to radio in 1993 with the start of radio transmissions by the privately-owned Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), aided by the staff and facilities of Radio Rwanda, the official government-owned station. RTLM was created, some believe, to avoid key clauses of the 1993 Arusha Peace Accords which barred the Rwandan government and the RPF from inciting to violence, promoting discrimination based on ethnicity, or issuing propaganda inciting people to hate. Mille Collines called on the Hutu majority to destroy the Tutsi minority, and many have cited it as an important factor in the spread of genocide following the President’s death. The programs were relayed to all parts of the country via a network of transmitters owned and operated by the government’s Radio Rwanda. Even after RPF troops drove the Provisional Government and allied forces out of Kigali in July 1994, they used mobile FM transmitters to broadcast disinformation from inside the French-occupied zone on the border between Rwanda and Zaire, causing millions of Hutus to flee toward refugee camps where they could be regrouped and recruited as future fighters.

No Western country took action in response to proposals from human rights and humanitarian groups to shut down or jam RTLM or Radio Rwanda broadcasts. There was no UN or other radio station to counter the incitement of violence (including violence against UN personnel) or to set the record straight. The UNAMIR commander in Kigali, Major-General Dallaire, has declared "if he had been equipped with proper jamming devices, many lives might have been spared (in Rwanda)."UNHCR is currently doing radio broadcasts in Rwanda and the refugee camps in neighboring Zaire and Tanzania which show that people can return to Rwanda. UNICEF is collaborating with the Rwandan Ministry of Higher Education to produce a series of radio messages on cultural differences. Search for Common Ground and Refugees International are working on a program known as Radio Reconciliation to counter hate programming in Rwanda, and Reporters sans frontières operated Radio Muraho in Rwanda in June 1994.

Burundi. Search for Common Ground began a peace radio effort in Burundi in August 1995, operating a radio studio in Bujumbura which produces three to four hours of programming per week for broadcast on Burundi state radio and Radio Agatashya, a station in Eastern Zaire. The studio’s mission is to counter the inflammatory rhetoric of hate radio by airing programs that promote peace and reconciliation. The studio has a mixed Hutu and Tutsi staff of five experienced journalists, plus production and administrative staff. The Search for Common Ground project director in Burundi serves as the program editor.

Burundi national radio broadcasts programs twice a week to refugees. An interview was broadcast with a returnee sitting next to people rumored to have been killed to illustrate that rumors are often wrong. The Walt Disney Corporation is taping a video for distribution in Burundi of UNICEF-sponsored puppet shows for children that teach reconciliation and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Search for Common Ground, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, the United Nations, and the World Bank, is setting up a studio in Bujumbura for broadcasting peace and reconciliation programming (Radio Nyogmoma).

Somalia. From Ethiopia, InterAfrica Group on UNICEF’s behalf broadcasts a peace program into Somalia on a daily basis. Radio is by far the most influential means of communication in Somalia, a highly oral society. The programs make specific links between peace, protection of women and children, and religious traditions. A UNESCO Symposium on Somali Peace and Reconciliation urged more media programs presenting positive images of components of peace-building such as traditional conciliation mechanisms and human rights. Somali participants in the UNESCO symposium in Sana’a also urged an increase in dissemination of traditional values which promote a more peaceful environment.

In the past, radio communication was monopolized by the government. However, more recently, the elders of several bitterly embattled clans in ‘Somaliland’ have remained in radio contact during periods of tension, and radio links have provided vital channels for negotiation.

Outside the Greater Horn

Video Dialogues in South Africa. Video Dialogues is a series of profiles of South African rural communities in transition, each focused around a particular conflict issue (for example, land rights, local government, or educational reform) that is critical to the community but has ramifications across the country. The purpose is to create forums with Local Peace Committees to further public debate, dialogue, and the management, if not resolution, of conflict within the communities. Community profiles around specific, contentious issues are screened within the communities themselves, as well as in the public broadcast.

In documenting each community’s debate and conflict, two videos are produced, using much of the same footage:

· A community video for use as a tool to mediate or open up debate and to educate and inform more broadly about an issue within the community at a "town meeting." This can be used within the original community and other similar communities.

· A public broadcast video to be shown on the South African Broadcasting Corporation which profiles the community in conflict and incorporates footage from the "town meeting."

Some corporations have offered to help fund the project. Each region, in coordination with the Regional Peace Committee (RPC) of the region, suggests critical towns to be profiled. It is too soon to evaluate the impact and outcome of this effort.

Other examples. In South Africa, Radio Xhosa is cooperating with a Peace Committee in producing a bi-weekly phone-in education program to discuss its work. Radio Metro also transmits information about the various Peace Committees. UNTAC set up a radio station in Cambodia for three months in 1993 to counter Khmer Rouge propaganda prior to the election.

Evaluation

Strengths

Peace media can have a significant impact on the conflict situation because it reaches a broad public audience. Reconciliation-oriented radio and television programs can contribute to and build support for efforts to prevent or mitigate conflict and can counter abuse of the media to incite violence. Peace media can present issues fairly and make alternative sources of information available.

Weaknesses

Jamming or taking out hate radio broadcasts may not be desirable: some believe that it is more important to hear and refute what perpetrators say. Taking action against hate radio may require high-level political decisions and involves concerns about the national sovereignty of states involved in domestic conflicts and perpetrators’ right to freedom of speech. In response, others say these arguments fail when radio broadcasts directly violate Article III(c) of the UN Genocide Convention, "direct and public incitement to commit genocide."

Information sources can be co-opted by elite ethnic or other partisan groups.

Lessons learned

While many believe "the media have an obligation to enhance preventive diplomacy efforts through reporting and analysis that is consistent with the canons and practices of journalism," very little has been evaluated or written regarding the role the media could play in preventive diplomacy. The New York University Center for War, Peace and the Media is developing a study to assess how those involved in preventive diplomacy can make better use of national and international media resources potentially at their disposal, activities available through peace media in support of preventive diplomacy, practical and procedural information and resources necessary to implement those activities, and the role of non-news-related media (for example, "entertainment programming") in avoiding or moderating conflict.

References and resources

Peter Gastrow, Search for Common Ground.

Baumann, Melissa and Hannes Siebert. "The Media as Mediator," Forum (Winter 1993).

Robert Karl Manoff, Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, New York University.

Frank Chalk, Hate Radio vs. Democracy: Lessons from United Nations and United States Experience in Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Somalia.