By Adelia Saunders
11 April 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, peace-building is in the air. Broadcasting in five languages to millions of people across Africa’s second-largest country, Kinshasa-based Radio Okapi delivers rigorous unbiased reporting on the process of nation-building. And perhaps just as importantly in one of Africa’s most recent battlefields, Radio Okapi provides a platform for debate.
“When you create a debate, you can find what is happening and let people ask themselves why is this happening,” Martin Sebujangwe, Editor-in-Chief of Radio Okapi, told MediaGlobal during a visit to the United Nations last week. “[You] make people accountable.”
As it struggles to recover from years of dictatorial rule and civil war, Radio Okapi has become an integral force for reconstruction and development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Jointly funded by the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, known by its French acronym, MONUC, and the Hirondelle Foundation, a Swiss organization with similar projects in six other former conflict zones, Radio Okapi is an independent news source, run by Congolese journalists committed to using the media to rebuild their country, which the UN ranks among the ten least developed nations in the world.
Since its creation in 2002, Okapi journalists have followed troop movements, reported attacks on civilians and raids on villages. They have interviewed soldiers who have gone months without pay, shopkeepers with nothing to sell, victims of rape and random violence. They have asked questions of rebel leaders, foreign diplomats and government generals, and covered the nation’s first multi-party elections in over 40 years. They have won awards and received death threats. Last June one reporter was killed.
“The journalists who are serving in Radio Okapi are an integral part of this very large peacekeeping mission,” said Kevin Kennedy, lead officer of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa. Charged with “multidisciplinary peacekeeping,” MONUC’s mandate includes reintegrating former combatants, reporting human rights abuses and monitoring elections. “In effect [Radio Okapi] has created immediate space where a debate can take place,” he said.
Reporters Without Borders, an international media watchdog group, expressed its concern for the security and freedom of the Congolese press in its 2008 Annual Report, citing harassment and arrests of journalists. Power and media are largely intertwined, and editorial independence is hard to come by. According to the report, “the Congolese media is highly politicized and consequently suffers as a result of highly-charged political tensions across the country.”
In such an atmosphere, only the strictest journalistic ethics can provide some measure of security to reporters, said Jean-Marie Etter, President of the Hirondelle Foundation, in an interview with MediaGlobal. “If you don’t do your work correctly, you expose yourself,” Etter said, underscoring the need for what he calls “obsessively rigorous journalism.”
Earning the respect of its audience is critical to the survival of any news organization. But in conflict areas, it can be a matter of life and death. “You just give information, and you try to give information that is correct, accurate, complete, exhaustive. The selection is done according to the need of the people and the interests of the people, and not to your interests or your organization’s interests,” Etter said.
Telling the truth, particularly when it is unpopular with those in power can be a risky proposition. But a misplaced accusation is even more dangerous. “The respect the population has for you, the respect that even the armed people have — it won’t necessarily prevent them from shooting at you, but they won’t do it as easily as if they could despise you,” Etter said.
While Radio Okapi’s journalists strive to be impartial, the station itself acts as a platform for debate. “People are extremely interested to see how their leaders are fighting with words, how they are arguing, what they are saying,” Etter noted. “This makes the tension diffuse.”
Debate in conflict or post-conflict zones is about more than blowing off steam. It can fundamentally change society. “The people who listen to you realize that you can ask, that the authorities are somewhere accountable,” he said. “Your perception of life changes. Your situation maybe is not going to change, but the perception of who you are, what is your place in society, of society itself, changes, and this is extremely important. The authorities start being accountable. And this you only can do through media, there is no other way to do it.”
Fostering debate is about asking questions, Sebujangwe said, giving the example of a shipment of HIV/AIDS medicines that arrived in a small city in the DRC several weeks ago.
“An event like this one is good,” he said. “It’s good to announce that the distribution has taken place to those that were in need. But is that our image? Do we stop by only saying that here it is, there are some medicines that arrived in the city? The question is why is it only today that those medicines arrived to this city where you have more than one million [people]?”
The media must both challenge and inform, he said, by asking what are sometimes uncomfortable questions. In the case of the HIV/AIDS medications, looking deeper may encourage more effective delivery in the future. “Where was the government?” Sebujangwe asked. “And what happened to the millions of dollars that were given by the IMF or the World Bank that have suddenly disappeared? Why is it three years later that those medicines arrived in the city?”
Not everyone likes the idea of a contentious media, and in times of political upheaval and national rebuilding, many believe the media should work in concert with the authorities. While reporters should be a nation’s “eyes and ears,” holding politicians to their promises, they also have “the duty to work with the government in peacekeeping,” said Atoki Ileka, the DRC’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Aid organizations and donors, Etter explained, hugely underestimate the value of independent media in post-conflict situations. Beyond being used as a public relations tool for campaigns targeting specific problems, such as HIV or sexual violence, the power of the press has been largely ignored by the development community. “Access to information is a basic human right,” Etter said. “It is extremely important to make a priority of independent media. It is not expensive, there is no comparison between what sending an armed force costs and making a media costs,” he said. The objectives of the two often overlap considerably.
But media isn’t cheap, and too often its power falls into the hands of the political elite. “Economic independence is the condition for editorial independence,” Etter said. If the funding is there, finding reporters with the skills and courage needed to build strong media in the world’s most unstable places is not a problem. “You always have such people in conflict areas,” he said. “If we were not there they would invent the journalism that we want to do. The main problem is that those people do not have a place to work as they would like to work,” he said.