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May/June 2006 Featured Story Radio: The Most Important Form of Popular Empowerment By Elizabeth Robinson
These are the words of Tunisian journalists, labor unionists, and human rights activists occasioned by a hunger strike launched by several of their members on October 18, 2005. They were protesting the holding of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis. How, they asked, is it possible to hold meetings concerned with communications and the digital divide in a country whose government denies its citizens the most rudimentary rights to freedom of expression and association? This government has routinely filtered Internet sites and imprisoned its youth for surfing the Internet; it has imprisoned journalists, denied them access to any kind of employment, and banished them to border regions hundreds of miles from their families. Insofar as it has offered one, “anti-terrorism” has been the Ben Ali government’s rationale.
This was the Tunis that I arrived in three days before the formal WSIS meetings began. I was there as a representative of AMARC (the French acronym for the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters). We were participating in the WSIS process in order to represent the interests of community radio and to champion Article 19 of the U.N. Charter on Human Rights, which posits access to communications as a fundamental right. AMARC’s president, Steve Buckley, had been a visible member of a group monitoring human rights in Tunisia in the run-up to the WSIS, so I was only a little surprised to find myself and colleagues under surveillance and our movements restricted: bags searched every time I entered a hotel, access to meeting rooms denied, men in dark glasses at every turn. More surprising was the discovery that most of the media covering the WSIS hadn’t a clue about these conditions, even though a French journalist had been severely beaten just days earlier. They were there to cover discussions on things like Internet governance, but seemed to be clueless about any local repression. After all, Tunis is a city with a very European feel, with wide boulevards, sidewalk cafés, and young women in designer jeans sans veils. By the time the meetings were to begin, a Belgian colleague had had film confiscated, a Tunisian journalist had been arrested without apparent reason, and a number of people had been pushed about in public. The situation was serious enough that we abandoned many of our activities in the meetings in order to inform the world about the hunger strikers and the conditions they were protesting. With representatives of Amnesty International, the Association for Progressive Communications, Human Rights Watch, Pen International, the CRIS campaign, and Tunisian activists, we organized a press conference that drew more than 200 people. There, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi, Tunisian activists, and others excoriated the Ben Ali government and precipitated international reports, including our own. Upon hearing reports, members of several European governments threatened withdrawal of economic relationships with Tunisia – and our Tunisian colleagues ventured into the street for what was the first public anti-government demonstration in many years. They have continued to receive support from abroad based on the WSIS exposé. Most recently, Le Monde Diplomatique filled two pages of newsprint with the story of Tunisian resistance.
This is a much abbreviated tale, but one that highlights the importance of independent media in quite dire circumstances. Since AMARC’s beginnings almost 25 years ago, its primary mission has been to create community radio (CR) at the grassroots, yet it has frequently found it necessary to intervene politically, from the local to the international level. So on the one hand, we have focused on securing legal frameworks that allow for the creation of CR stations, and training people to manage and create content for them. But on the other, there have also been numerous instances when we have had to intervene to protect practitioners and would-be practitioners – in apartheid South Africa, Haiti, Nepal, Yugoslavia, and even these United States. Control of media isn’t simply about making money: it is about setting agendas, controlling populations. Attacks on our member stations bear eloquent testimony to the potential empowerment that communications rights bring to people. In the past year, Radio Sagarmatha was taken over by the Nepalese government, then returned to the community on the condition that it only play music. In March 2006, three directors of CR stations in Guatemala were arrested and their equipment confiscated, despite the fact the community media were part of the negotiated settlement between government and insurgents in the 1990s. In Uganda, where there is ongoing warfare, CR practitioners are always under threat of being identified with one or the other side in the conflict, and some stations have been destroyed or closed. In Kenya, the only legal CR station was taken over by village elders because they objected to women being in charge of it. We in AMARC believe that radio remains the single most important medium in democratization and popular empowerment, not because other media are less important but because radio is the only one that reaches almost the entire human race. It is cheap, does not require literacy – much less English fluency (!) – and can give voice to a village or neighborhood. Today, AMARC is a truly global grassroots organization, with member stations on all continents. A dozen years ago, the concept of community media barely existed in Africa, where we now have more than 300 stations. During the past four years, AMARC Asia has been born: stations or agitations for them are popping up in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, and elsewhere. In November 2006 we will hold our general assembly, which occurs only every three to four years, in Amman, Jordan. We hope that holding it there will help develop the community media sector in the Middle East. Community activists in Morocco, Jordan, and Palestine, as well as those in Tunisia, have approached AMARC to express their desire to reform media in their countries to resist both Western media hegemony and their own autocratic governments. The AMARC ideal is encompassed by the phrase “All the Voices.” Our premise is the necessity of hearing many perspectives if we are to realize a more just and equitable world.
Elizabeth Robinson is treasurer of AMARC and a radio producer at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara, California. She has also produced a public access television program, Third World News Review, and been a media activist for more than 20 years. ©2006 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
