Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Conflict Reporting

Dev Raj Dahal, Nepal

“The spiral of violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication.” Jurgen Habermas

The Context

South Asia is engulfed by ideological, religious, cultural and gender, identity, sub-national and distributional conflicts. Majority of these conflicts spring from a condition of democratic deficit arising from selfish interest of certain leaders who believe that democracy has become a majority rule rather than popular sovereignty. This democratic deficit has left human rights struggle of peoples in the region largely unfinished. Direct, structural and latent conflicts continue to destroy the public and private world of people, rendering them petrified and reducing them to invisibility. Each conflict creates its own elites, associates and sympathizers and renders the people a benumbed witness.

Violent conflict has become a part of the social evolution of South Asian societies. In a situation of conflict, getting information is always associated with risks, costs and opportunities. Journalists, like other citizens, are part of a conflict system. Their responsible opinion, reporting, analysis and judgments bear a major impact on breaking the vicious cycle of conflict. Conflict situation is also individual driven. The self-awareness of journalists and their conflict-sensitive approaches can be expected to contribute mutual understanding among the stakeholders and allows them to become emancipated and rational people.

Violent conflict cripples the audience of media and people’s right to know by enforcing a culture of silence. By taking politics out of public life, it weakens the power of media to stimulate social relations and reduces the prospects for rational change. In the poor countries costs of conflict is too heavy to be borne by people majority of them are just struggling for basic needs. Everyday media detonates debates to inform policy makers and political community about the imperative of protecting human rights, conflict mediation and peace. The rights of journalists to freedom from fear and affirmation to life-choices are essential preconditions to prepare the society for democracy, human rights and pluralist sense of justice. Media renews the public life of society and repairs conditions that makes communication effective.

Conflict Construction

Journalists must know how conflict is constructed, what are the unseen motives, which sets the dynamics and what is the purpose behind its escalation. Use of conflict analysis and conflict mapping in reporting the root causes of conflict can help decision-makers to seek the solution of conflict. Building multiple bonds of trust and network of journalists helps in fostering open, honest and dependable working relationship, opening exchange of ideas and offering concrete alternative to conflict transformation. Media can pull together the “connectors of society” so as to link different groups in the bonding. Peace building largely rests on training and peace education to journalist who can simplify the arcane language of experts, researchers and academics to make the message and information clear, precise and understandable to the ordinary public and create multiple spaces for peace.

Mission Journalism

Journalists are not only observers and reporters of events; they are also citizens with constitutional and human rights and duties. These civic responsibilities require them to formulate non-partisan, rational perspective in conflict perception. They can perform this duty only if freedoms of the press and journalists’ safety and professional autonomy are guaranteed. In times of conflict, media has to wear the face of rationality because it serves the universal roles in promoting public need for peace.

An unrestrained communication makes for a healthy community. Journalists are driven by a sense of public mission to foster normative values of social cohesion, harmony and peace. Value neutrality, detachment and a claim for professional prerogatives in society do not mean abdication of public duties. The fundamental challenge of South Asian journalists now is to bring back the mutilated public into normal life and transfer the society of interest groups that are not communicating to each other into a deliberative public.

During pre-conflict phase, media workers can provide early warning of the potentiality of conflict eruption and identification of fault line zones. During the conflict situation, media workers can supply information to increase people’s sensitivity about conflict, enable them to take part in the political, economic and social process in a meaningful way and mobilize popular pressure for conflict de-escalation. They equally have a major responsibility to defend civil liberties, provoke robust debates and political criticism to energize the public interest in peace. During post conflict situation media workers can provide support to the victimized journalists and aggrieved people to get justice and freedom, educate the public about human rights and flesh out alternative approaches for conflict resolution. In South Asia, where politicians tend to communicate more to the media than to each other, media workers have additional responsibility in spreading the messages of freedom, peace and social justice.

Building the capacity of journalists for conflict reporting means equipping media workers with professional knowledge and skills and instilling in them a spirit of inquiry so that they can create public opinion relevant to the political imperative of reconciliation and democratic peace. Ignorance of public implies the failure of media and denial of people’s right to know about public affairs.

Conflict-Sensitive Reporting

Whatever news journalists report does not spring “unknowingly.” Social and political “facts” are neither context-free not free from the language, feelings, thoughts and culture of people. To be sure, they are drawn from certain life situation where the display of power, resource, identity and resistance generates vicious cycles of causes and effects. Facts are interpreted and reported according to the values, preferences, knowledge and skills of journalists. During violent conflict, a growing perception of fear prevents journalists to objectively report the fact of human rights violations. Because of this fact, perception often plays as important a role in human life as does facts. In a situation of violent conflict, the responsibility of media personnel, therefore, lies not only in “framing facts” in the name of objectivity that may sometimes stir up events but instill in the main actors certain normative values that are useful for the mitigation of conflicts. Freedom of the press minimizes the ferocity of violence by means of enforcing the accountability of human rights violators and keeping the public in a constant state of vigilance.

Journalists need to anticipate the consequences of information they report and debunk private opinions reported as facts. During a situation of violent conflict, human values and perspectives are as important as facts. There is always a perceptual gap between reporter’s definition of the situation and more objective facts of reality reported as accurate judgment. Maintaining a sense of proportion between perception and judgment is, therefore, absolutely essential. Similarly, when human lives are really at stake, reporting the news should not be decided by market imperatives of profit calculus, but by social utility of protecting public interest. Only then, information and knowledge can serve as instruments of human solidarity and bring the public back into a normal life.

 Conclusion

The practice of our daily living together rests on undistorted communication. The more we communicate effectively with others the more we develop understanding with them, learn together and work on solutions of the problems faced by them and the ordinary public.

Heartfelt condolence

The Chief Editor and the entire family of the Telegraph Weekly in Kathmandu expresses its heartfelt condolence over the devastation and the loss of civilian lives caused by the Hurricane KATRINA in the Southern parts of the United States of America and prays for the eternal peace of the departed souls.

May the Almighty provide the needed courage to bear this immense loss to the bereaved families.

We also urge the US Embassy in Kathmandu to convey our profound sorrow and grief to the people, the government and the families that were hard hit by the hurricane.