Afghanistan's media battleground ---- by Rahilla Zafar, Kabul ----
[excerpt] Six years ago television was banned in Afghanistan and its single national radio station was Taliban-run. William Reeve was a BBC Afghanistan correspondent for two years in the early 1990s during the time of the warlords and for two years in 1998-1999 during the Taliban regime. He remembers the days when the main sources of reliable information for Afghans, before and during the time of the Taliban, were the daily BBC broadcasts in Dari and Pashto. In a country that has suffered through decades of war, reliable news was needed to ensure safety. Surveys have shown that when big stories were being played out in Afghanistan, as many as 70 per cent of the Afghan population would hear what was happening in their country from BBC broadcasts in their own languages. Their lives would often depend on this. So they tended to glue themselves to the evening BBC broadcasts all around the country, Reeve recalls. Today the countrys independent media are considered to be a major success story but like most developments in this war-battered nation it finds itself increasingly under threat. While the establishment of an independent media has played a pivotal role in uniting an ethnically-divided country, the re-emergence of warlords and a reluctant government puts such gains in jeopardy. Since 2002, hundreds of media outlets opened with the help of an international donor community that recognised a free press as a necessary ingredient of nation-building in a country where 90 per cent of its people live in rural areas. There were so many media trainers here in 2002 that I wondered who was going to feed the people, says Dominic Medley who served as country director for Internews in 2002, an organisation that has helped to set up 35 regional radio stations. And despite a promising start, sustaining independent media stations has become a challenge in Afghanistan. Obstacles include the rise of warlord-backed media outlets; a growing lack of security for journalists; and the reluctance of Afghan officials to embrace an independent media. With so many actors involved from international military forces, foreign governments, as well as Afghan political leaders and warlords, the media have evolved at a fast pace that far exceeds what the actual market size of 22 million dollars could support. more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/Afghanmediabattleground081226.cfm# _______________________________________________ cr-india mailing list [email protected] https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/cr-india
