Battle for Afghanistan's air
waves By Catherine A Fitzpatrick
A viable and free press in Afghanistan is widely
recognized by the international community and Afghans
themselves as a top priority in the reconstruction of
one of the world's poorest and most war-ravaged
countries. Yet Western donors have also come to see that
conditions in Afghanistan have meant both scaling back
expectations and adapting to realities on the ground.
When governments pledged US$5.2 billion in assistance
for Afghanistan in 2002, with $3.8 billion to be given
in the form of grants, media development was envisaged
as an important albeit secondary priority. Millions of
dollars have now been spent to reform or create media
since the war, yet money alone has not been able to
surmount basic logistical difficulties and philosophical
differences.
So far, the United States, the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and other
countries, as well as the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization and other UN
agencies have all contributed millions to media
assistance in Afghanistan. With so many diverse projects
and differing definitions of what constitutes a "media"
project (some humanitarian reconstruction projects
contain media infrastructure), it is difficult to assess
how much of the aid packages worked out by the West
really target media issues, and of that figure, how much
has gone directly to subsidizing local Afghan
media.
Noah Miller, currently business manager
of Internews Afghanistan, a US-based media-assistance
non-governmental organization, is working to make local
media sustainable. As a graduate student last year at
the London-based Stanhope Center for Communications
Policy Research, he published a study of Afghan
media-development issues. Miller cited the Afghan
Assistance Coordination Authority's database of 31
media-assistance projects with funding requests totaling
$56.8 million. But he found that the requests had
generated donor commitments of only $29.8 million, of
which only $4.7 million was disbursed at that time, that
is actually transferred into accounts to which grantees
can gain access.
Furthermore, of the $4.7
million, Miller found that $2.22 million was spent
repairing facilities damaged during the US-led 2001
bombing campaign or on radio broadcasts providing
information on relief operations and the loya
jirga (grand council), rather than on local
community-news development. More funds have flowed since
Miller's study last year, but the time lag between
requests and expenditures and the difficulties of
getting projects going and sustained in Afghanistan mean
that such programs cannot be assessed only by their
budget line at donors' conferences.
Last year,
the US military distributed 200,000 free transistor
radios - an indication of the very basic needs of
Afghanistan, which differ considerably from nearby
Central Asian countries and even some African developing
nations. With only about 36% of the population literate
and with the country's poorly developed infrastructure,
radio remains by far the most popular medium. Many areas
still lack electricity and television sets, so reaching
most of the population through television is not an
option.
About 37% of the population, or 7.5
million Afghans, listen to the radio, Internews reports.
Another Internews survey found that 24% of rural Afghans
can be reached by local radio or television stations,
although many households do not have electricity and the
number of those who possess radios and batteries is not
known.
In addition to the reformed government broadcasting system, Radio
Arman, the first independent station, was
launched in 2003. Some conservatives were outraged
that "young girls can be heard laughing on
the air", according to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders
(Reporters Sans Frontieres, RSF), a non-governmental
press-freedom group. The station grew popular in what an
Afghan journalist told RSF was a "radio-centric"
country, and others soon followed.
Internews
has now set up 14 radio stations across Afghanistan
with funding from the United States Agency for
International Development's Office of Transitional
Initiatives. Additional support from Germany has been provided
for such Internews activities as a publication called
"Media Monitor", which tracks press-freedom violations and
development issues for the local media community and the
general public.
Last July,
Internews asked station managers across the country
to map the footprint of their radio stations. They
found there is a disparity between urban and rural listeners.
International broadcasters such as Voice of
America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC)
and Deutsche Welle have all organized programming for
Afghanistan. In a study of Afghan media prepared last
year called "Afghan Media Landscape", the Baltic Media
Center (BMC), based in Denmark and implementing programs
in Afghanistan, says that for now international stations
"provide pluralism in a country where private
broadcasting can hardly survive". Without a thriving,
independent business sector, advertising cannot
flourish, the report noted. The BMC is concerned that
international projects might inadvertently displace
domestic efforts that also need support. "In a mid-term
perspective, the immense competition from these
[foreign] radios will threaten both Radio Afghanistan
and possibly Afghan private initiatives," the BMC study
worries.
Such concerns, however, might be
misplaced. Although foreign stations have considerable
audiences, when Internews conducted a survey last year
of 2,000 radio sets, they found that 80% were tuned to
the two Afghan independent radio stations, which feature
mainly Indian, Afghan and Western music with some news
programming.
As with other areas of support
for fledgling civil-society and liberal institutions, media
developers have to face the reality that journalism as a
profession is not established or protected in
Afghanistan. In its annual report, RSF describes as "old
enemies" of the press "warlords, conservatives and the
Taliban". RSF and the US-based Committee to Protect
Journalists have tracked dozens of cases of threats,
harassment and even murder of Afghan journalists for
their work.
With the history of suppression of
women's rights in Afghanistan, donors have also focused
heavily on building the capacity of women to access and
use journalism training and to participate in
broadcasting. Internews and other media-assistance
providers have found that radio listening is a
male-dominated activity, and broadcasts came at times of
the day that are not convenient for some listeners.
Slowly, this is beginning to change. Women have
begun to work for national media outlets, and at least
four stations that are specifically run by women and
feature women's issues have begun broadcasting in Kabul,
Mazar-i-Sharif, Jabul Saraj and Herat. These stations
can only broadcast a few hours each day, and face
opposition from various forces challenging their effort
to participate in society. They have experienced the
difficulties of all fledgling institutions in
Afghanistan, with conservatives clashing with liberals -
many of whom are returning from exile - in a dynamic
that affects all of Afghan politics, including the
media.
Aina, or "Mirror", is an organization
that was founded in 2001 by an Iranian photojournalist
to promote press freedom. It is based in Paris with
offices around the world, and it supported an
educational mobile cinema in Afghanistan, the first
women's radio station, and the first school for
photojournalists. The London-based non-governmental
Institute for War and Peace Reporting runs training
programs and publishes the weekly "Afghan Recovery
Report", which uses stories written by student
journalists.
Donors' plans for television have
clashed with realities, such as the January 2003
conservative Supreme Court ruling banning cable stations
on the grounds that the programming was "pornographic"
and "anti-Islamic". A Justice Ministry official has said
that Voice of Afghan Women radio is "against Sharia
law". But in April, cable-television networks resumed
broadcasting, reportedly evidence that more liberal
forces in the Karzai government had prevailed. An
official ban on singing on television and state radio
remains in place, but radio stations ignore it. The
cable programs likely do not reach an audience greater
than 100,000, and a lot of the programming is strictly
entertainment-oriented.
The BMC says that when
Afghanistan began to reform and reconstruct, it moved
faster toward freedom of expression than most of its
Central Asian neighbors had. There is reason to be
optimistic about local support for press freedom. One
reason is that the ministers now responsible for the
media lived in the West for many years and have some
understanding of the importance of editorial
independence. Another reason is that the same
international donors who worked in the Balkans and
Central Asia have not pushed as much for full-fledged
free-media legislation that "lives up to international -
in reality, Western - standards", says BMC. Yet another
factor is that donors have introduced conditionality by
providing equipment under the pledge of editorial
independence. This was not always done in the former
Soviet Union in the haste to professionalize the media.
But the freedoms gained have been quickly seized on by
factional forces controlled by various warlords, and
without a clearly established institution of the "fourth
estate", freedom could paradoxically lead to less
freedom over time.
Culture and Education
Minister Yonus Anon was quoted in an interview with BMC
as saying the media could promote a new culture, the
rights of women, and national unity as long as they do
not undermine the government, which he believes is the
only hope for peace. The BMC voices the concerns of many
Western donors when it says it believes that extensive
training and the founding of ethics boards can reduce
the tendency of journalism toward "destructive
sensationalism".
Differences over how the media
should be developed reflect the larger divisive issues
of the society, says BMC. For example, some officials
want to promote media freedom and others want to
suppress it. Even many of those promoting it want the
media to perform certain missions. The official state
media body Radio Television Afghanistan is described by
the BMC as "a profound defender of editorial
independence" while also demonstrating "warm support of
Islam as an integrated part of programming". Anon
defends independent public broadcasting and wants some
programs featuring religion and some free of it.
So far, despite the professional training that
occurred in the Soviet era in Afghanistan and that some
experienced while in exile in the West, local
institutions have not been formed easily. Journalists
who tried to create an independent journalists' union
last year with international help failed because of
political conflicts, says RSF. RSF believes that the
tensions playing out in other areas between progressive
journalists and conservatives made the union impossible.
"The editor of an independent publication exclaimed at a
preparatory meeting: 'I see so many warlords here that I
wonder when they became journalists,'" RSF reported.
RSF says that one problem in media development
is that Taliban groups and others such as Islamist
warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar have abused the media for
their political goals. RSF has documented dozens of
incidents in which reporters have been intimidated,
detained and even killed by various factions. Media
outlets find themselves under constant pressure. For
example, in Jalalabad staff at one radio station went on
strike after armed mujahideen came to the station to
complain it was not giving their activities enough
coverage.
Although Western assistance officials
fret about media footprints and have to cope with
daunting logistical and cultural differences and
physical danger in trying to launch media projects,
war-torn Afghanistan already has an existing, durable,
portable, and effective system for disseminating
information and knowledge: the mosque. People might be
without radios and electricity, but as the Afghanistan
Peace Education Program of McMaster Center for Peace
Studies in Canada has noted, "there is one mosque for
every 50 to 100 households, while countless villages
have no school at all".
Looking at the
institutions already in the communication business, the
McMaster Center has pointed out that mosques are
"community-built, community-run, and community-supported
institutions, the expenses of which are paid through
voluntary or community-organized mechanisms". In
addition to the mosque, many Afghans get their news by
going to the bazaar, family weddings, or other local
cultural events. These age-old methods for spreading
information may be low-technology, but they are trusted
and used, without any special Western training, and very
accessible.
Catherine A
Fitzpatrick is the editor of
RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies, a weekly collection of news briefs
from RFE/RL about freedom of the press, religion and
other civil society issues in Eastern Europe and
Eurasia.
Copyright 2004 RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington, DC 20036
